An embodiment of the invention provides a pluggable persistent store for use with queuing and messaging servers, such as a JMS server, which can be used to provide reliable messaging. The persistent store is accessed by the messaging server via a standard Application Program Interface (API) or interface that includes asynchronous persistence capability. A lower level pluggable API or interface allows the plugging-in of different persistent mechanisms, that can be used to support different persistence sources, such as file systems and databases. The standard API, combined with an asynchronous persistence capability, together provide a simple, flexible, and high-performance reliable messaging system.