Vendors Unveil Service Component Architecture for Building SOA Applications
Wednesday 30 November 2005The Service Component Architecture simplifies the development of creating business services and Service Data Objects for accessing data residing in multiple locations and formats.
BEA Systems, IBM Corporation, IONA Technologies, Oracle, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Sybase, Xcalia and Zend Technologies announced support for a new specification for building and packaging applications called Service Component Architecture (SCA). SCA is a specification that allows developers to focus on writing business logic. The SCA simplifies the development of creating business services and Service Data Objects (SDO) for accessing data residing in multiple locations and formats.
"Bill Roth, Vice President of the BEA Workshop Business Unit, likens SCA to a "deployment descriptor on steroids, that works with any language, not just Java. SCA also allows for the use of procedural languages and declarative language such as BPEL and XSLT. "One thing that sets SCA apart is that it has been designed for SOA, unlike other systems like J2EE which has been adapted to it," Roth added. "It focuses on being able to describe assemblies of components which have been written in a variety programming models and protocols."
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SCA provides a model for implementing IT services that are defined in terms of a business function, and make middleware functions more accessible to developers. SCA also provides a model for the assembly of business solutions from collections of individual services, with control over aspects of the solution such as access methods and security. SCA support in BEA Workshop "will be forthcoming," according to Roth.
SDO complements SCA by providing a common way to access many different kinds of data. The specification reduces the skill levels and time required to access and manipulate business data, according to BEA. Today, a multitude of APIs are used to manipulate data, and tend to tightly couple the source and target of the data, making their use error-prone and subject to breaking as business requirements evolve. SDO makes it easier to use and realize the value of these APIs without having to code directly to them.
The SDO 2.0 specification will be implemented within the next major release of BEA's AquaLogic Data Services Platform product family, which already supports SDO 1.0 today, Roth said. He added that BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform already employs SCA technology.
SCA and SDO will be available royalty free and the authors are soliciting industry feedback.
Together they offer:
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A Language Neutral Assembly Model specification to simplify the development and usage of Business Services called: "Service Component Architecture"
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A Java Language specification for implementing SCA service components
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A C++ Language specification for implementing SCA service components
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A Java Language Service Data Objects specification describing a common rendering methodology for data exchange between clients and services
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A C++ Language Service Data Objects specification describing a common rendering methodology for data exchange between clients and services
For more information about SCA, visit http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2005/11/sca.html .