soapreliabilityws-reliablemessaging

How may I teach that SOAP is not a reliable transport?

I need to teach that a HTTP SOAP call may be received but the caller may not get the response due to a network failure (among other problems). (This problem made WS-ReliableMessaging be developed)

How would you guys show this problem to a web service developer so they can develop taking into account that duplicate messages may be received?

The problem is that they do not understand that a HTTP call may be received perfectly by the server and acted on the server, but the response to the caller may be lost.

Solution

  • The best answer I found is that:

    HTTP requests must be Idempotent since they may be executed more than once due to network problems

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol#Idempotent_methods_and_web_applications

    SAP has a very good page about this problem: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73/helpdata/en/c8/35883707e94534b2bda403237ee523/content.htm