RE: Need volunteer to draft definition of reliable messaging,wasRE:reliable messaging - hop by hop

[David Fischer <david@drummondgroup.com>]

Dan, Absolutely correct.  The ONLY way for ensuring success is end-to-end
reciepts/acks.  While this is obviously true for SMTP, it is also true for ALL
messaging methods.  Some methods are more reliable so this is not as intuitive
but it is still true.

Say for example, I send an HTTP request and then my connection is dropped.
Since DFN and Acks are also governed by Retries then if I stay offline for a
period greater than the Retries * RetryInterval for the DFN or Acks, I will
never receive either.  Lack of a failure is not success.  We cannot guarantee
either an Ack or DFN on synchronous transports.  The only means for determining
success is an end-to-end Receipt/Ack.  Whatever we do in the middle is just to
increase reliability.

David Fischer
Drummond Group.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Weinreb [mailto:dlw@exceloncorp.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2001 7:24 AM
To: mwsachs@us.ibm.com
Cc: david@drummondgroup.com; rberwanger@btrade.com;
ebxml-msg@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: Need volunteer to draft definition of reliable
messaging,was RE:reliable messaging - hop by hop


I agree.  We should allow the use of SMTP, and end-to-end reliable
messaging should take care of message losses inside SMTP.  This is a
special case of the principle that the network should be considered
capable of losing messages in general, just as TCP assumes that
a packet sent via IP can always be lost.