Question 1
A financial services firm is architecting a new trade processing platform. A key non-functional requirement is that once a trade message is accepted by the system, its successful processing must be guaranteed, even if downstream services are temporarily unavailable. The system should be able to retry processing the message for up to 24 hours. Which WS-* specification is specifically designed to address this requirement?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
WS-ReliableMessaging is a protocol that enables messages to be delivered reliably between distributed applications in the presence of software component, system, or network failures. It defines mechanisms for guaranteed delivery, duplicate elimination, and message ordering. This directly addresses the requirement for guaranteed processing despite temporary service unavailability. WS-AtomicTransaction deals with distributed transactions, WS-Security handles message-level security, and WS-Policy describes service capabilities and constraints.