The present invention enables a messaging kernel to serve as the basis for asynchronous messaging in a Web service platform. The kernel provides basic messaging features, including point-to-point and publish/subscribe messaging, persistent and non-persistent messages, a variety of acknowledgement modes, two-phase commit transactions, quotas, statistics, message sorting, and message paging. It also includes some novel features that maintain message order based on application requirements. This description is not intended to be a complete description of, or limit the scope of, the invention. Other features, aspects, and objects of the invention can be obtained from a review of the specification, the figures, and the claims.