The Service Component Architecture group announced nine new members including Cape Clear, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software, Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, Software AG, Sun Microsystems and TIBCO. These companies join BEA Systems, Inc., IBM Corporation, Interface21, IONA Technologies PLC, Oracle, and SAP AG in this multi vendor specification initiative.
This group also announced a wiki based web site called OSOA.ORG, which stands for Open Service Oriented Architecture Organization. Specifications and early implementations of SCA and SDO (Service Data Objects) will be published on this site. This site is intended to collect feedback about early work on these specifications and implementations going forward.
Two major items of development in the spec include an emphasis on simplification of bindings and policy work for enterprise developers to simply and the ability for developers to declaratively supply policy hints. The simplification included the elimination of many special cases to create a single comprehensive composite model. The capability of declaratively supplying policy hints in development include examples such as for security policy you can specify none, basic, or certificate based policies. An internal Job Application service may not need security, but for example salary service may require security. Hints can be included as part of the development process.
The technology reach for SCA now includes BPEL, PHP Spring and EJB, which means a variety of implementation languages can be used to manifest SCA components.
SCA was formed less than 8 months ago, the current focus is on rapid technology innovation and are working towards completion of SCA and SDO specifications. The remaining work is to incorporate feedback and make documents consistent. The organization also wants to incorporate feedback from early implementations including the open source work. The second priority is to standardization. The goal is to turn this work over to a standardization body--and to validate the most appropriate standards body to govern this by the end of this year. The two criteria include the Web Services specialization as well as metadata--so also model driven development. Compared to the OASIS work with SOA Adoption Blueprints, their work is more at the best practices level as opposed to the core technologies level, and is therefore at a different level of abstraction.
