WS-ReliableMessaging and DeliveryAssurances

Stefan asks why the formal specification for the delivery assurance policy assertions was omitted from the recently revised WS-Reliable Messaging specification.

The delivery assurance policy assertions were removed because of feedback received during the feedback and interop workshops, and through the comments link. Basically, it was felt by the authors that while it is important to point out the various levels of delivery assurance that the protocol supports, that because the protocol itself is unaffected by the choice of delivery assurance that we would be better served to simply remove the aspect related to both how an endpoint relates its respective QoS assurances and how it implements support for the level(s) of delivery assurance.

The WS-Reliable Messaging specification makes it clear that the fulfilment of the delivery assurance is the responsibility of the RM Destination. How an RM Destination communicates to the Application Destination the delivery assurance characteristics it offers/supports, or how an Application Destination requests or selects, a particular delivery assurance is therefore an implementation-specific choice and hence out of scope of the specification.

Additionally, the delivery assurance policy assertions were only informative for the Application or RM Source. We received feedback that suggested that it was unclear as to what, if anything, the RM Source needed to do with the information. Anything that we might say would be encroaching on implementation specifics and the authors agreed that anything to do with implementation specifics is completely out of scope.