there’s an interesting discussion regarding an open transport protocol for aysnc web services on the w3c web services list [note:the thread breaks and then continues in july] :

“One of the biggest holes to web service adoption inside the enterprise seems
to be the lack of an open transport protocol for aysnc, reliable message
delivery. By this I mean an equivalent of HTTP which provides for two-way
async communication with decent performance. Ideally, this protocol should
become a standard over time enabling “out of the box” web service
interoperability between different vendors, products, systems, etc. What
I’m envisioning is having different systems be able to communicate
asynchronously inside the enterprise the way they might communicate outside
the enterprise via HTTP.

“There are a few proprietary alternatives (that I know of) including Tibco’s
Rendezvous, IBM’s MQ APIs, and JMS. But none of these is open and I don’t
think you would see widespread adoption as such. One cannot assume that
every system is going to be able to talk Rendezvous the way one can assume
about HTTP. JMS might be the closest thing to what I’m thinking about, but
it seems tightly coupled to Java and it really is more of an API for driving
messaging systems rather than a transport protocol.”

“There’s also a few open protocol possiblities (again that I know of)
including the Jabber as Middleware effort (jam.jabber.org) which aims to
provide a messaging transport over Jabber’s XML on IM backbone. Anyone know
of any (other?) efforts going on in this area?”

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