A group of information technology companies published a specification Thursday designed to improve the reliability of business applications that use Web services. The specification, WS-Reliability, which will be submitted to a standards body in a few weeks, was written by a number of companies, including Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Sonic Software. If accepted as a standard and adopted by Web services providers, will let a company ensure that a message sent between two different applications is delivered reliably. For example, a company could send a purchase order to a supplier via a Web service and be guaranteed that the message was either successfully delivered and performed its function, or that the transmission failed. Currently, businesses working with Web services can make sure their communications are reliable using specialized software or other established products. WS-Reliability seeks to create a standardized method that is widely supported. Read more. [via CNet News.com]