Leading Vendors Extend SOA Collaboration

In the Enterprise:

Signifying the growing interest in and adoption of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), several leading technology vendors, who have been working together to create Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications, announced key achievements, including a significant increase in industry involvement and advancements in the development of SOA-related specifications and technologies. The group also launched a vendor-neutral Web site (www.osoa.org) to serve as an information resource for access to draft specifications, white papers, and for providing a forum for industry input and feedback.

Since agreeing to work together on new industry specifications to simplify SOA application development in November, BEA Systems, IBM, IONA, Oracle, SAP AG, Sybase, Xcalia and Zend have been joined by Cape Clear, Interface21, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software (formerly Sonic Software), Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, Software AG, Sun Microsystems and TIBCO Software. With the new partners on board, the group of 17 organizations spans SOA and applications companies to infrastructure and open source providers. Together, they have achieved considerable technical progress in developing SCA and SDO technologies, including new and updated draft specifications. The SCA specifications are designed to help simplify the creation and composition of business services while the SDO specifications focus on uniform access to data residing in multiple locations and formats.

According to a March Gartner report entitled "SCA Is a Winner in the Quest to Establish a Common Notation for SOA", Gartner research vice president Jess Thompson, stated, "One of the most important aspects of SCA is that it establishes a foundation for a standard notation for expressing a standard set of concepts for specifying service-oriented architecture."

The group's work has already resulted in the development of new draft SCA specifications for a declarative policy framework; improved description of connectivity with bindings specifications for JMS, JCA and Web Services; and new BPEL and PHP authoring models. In addition, draft specifications for Service Assembly; Java and C++ service authoring; and SDO have been updated.

The SCA and SDO specifications can help organizations to more easily create new and transform existing IT assets, enabling reusable services that may be rapidly assembled to meet changing business requirements. These specifications can greatly reduce complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform. Both are emerging technologies designed to simplify the representation of business logic and business data.