reliable messaging

[Martin W Sachs <mwsachs@us.ibm.com>]

Don't the two trading partners have to agree on the maximum time for a
message to be successfully delivered or a delivery failure notification
returned?  When can I decide that the message was in fact delivered?  For a
business process that includes return of a "received" or "received and
parsed" signal, receipt of such a signal confirms delivery, but when do I
decide that it isn't going to come?  That time should be a lot shorter than
the time to process the request.  For example, I may request a stock trade
transaction and expect that the trade will take place within, say, 2 hours,
but the confirmation might not be posted to the broker's database until
overnight.  I would want to know quickly that the trade request was
accepted or failed to be delivered.  I could continuously poll for a
delivery failure notification, but how long do I poll?

One possibility is that persistDuration is in fact the time that I am
looking for, provided we say that it has to be long enough to include
reliable delivery of a delivery failure notification (and maybe change its
name).

Regards,
Marty

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Martin W. Sachs
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
P. O. B. 704
Yorktown Hts, NY 10598
914-784-7287;  IBM tie line 863-7287
Notes address:  Martin W Sachs/Watson/IBM
Internet address:  mwsachs @ us.ibm.com
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