Ramblings of an integration guy

Often customers will say 'I want reliable messaging'. At this point I ask lots of questions – the main one being 'what happens if you lose that message'. Only then can I actually start to ascertain what *they* mean by 'reliable' In this blog I'd like to cover the messaging terms 'persistence', reliability', 'transactionality' and 'acknowledgements'. These are all terms used when talking about messaging. Unfortunately, it's the ease with which each term can interchange with the other that is the problem. Aligned to all these terms are the more specification like: at-most-once, at-least-once and once-and-once only. 

All of the Enterprise Integration Patterns are supported by WSO2 ESB and the store and forward pattern is one such pattern [1] The Store and Forward EIP pattern That page gives you a nice view of the pattern at a high-level and I thought I'd embellish it a little with my findings in this blog entry and the next to bring you all the info in one place.