Action: Distinguishing submitting a message from delivering it.

[David Hull <dmh@tibco.com>]

Here is proposed text for a disclaimer to be added somewhere in the Introduction or in Terminology and Concepts.

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For clarity, many passages in this document refer simply to a NotificationProducer sending messages or a NotificationConsumer receiving them.  In the absence of a reliable message delivery mechanism, messages sent from a given node may not actually arrive at their destination, or may be duplicated or arrive of order.  Existing reliable message delivery standards therefore distinguish between submitting a message for reliable delivery, reliably transmitting it, and receiving the delivered message from the reliable transport.

Any mention of message delivery in this document should be read with the understanding that it is a matter of policy whether reliable messaging is in effect, and if so to what degree.  With respect to the reliable messaging model above, the NotificationProducer producing a notification for a NotificationConsumer corresponds to submitting a message for delivery.  Phrases such as "the NotificationConsumer will receive notification" should interpreted with this in mind.  Note also that under certain circumstances a NotificationProducer may not produce an uninterrupted stream of notifications, or may not produce notifications in a given order.  Such behavior is independent of any reliable message delivery mechanism in effect.  The reliable message delivery mechanism can only reflect the behavior of the NotificationProducer.