SCA and SDO

["Miko Matsumura" <mmatsumura@infravio.com>]

Any perspectives on SCA and SDO from BEA, Oracle, IBM or other folks
here?

IT Firms Create New Industry Specifications to Help SOA Application
Development

Oracle
11/30/2005 5:34:20 PM
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REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., 30-NOV-2005 BEA Systems, IBM Corporation, IONA
Technologies, Oracle, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Sybase, Xcalia and Zend
Technologies today announced an effort to develop specifications and
resulting collaborative technologies that simplify how organizations
create and implement applications in a Service Oriented Architecture.
Using the SOA Programming Model specifications, organizations can more
easily create new and transform existing IT assets into reusable
services that may be rapidly adapted to meet changing business
requirements. Further, the specifications greatly reduce complexity
associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify
services regardless of programming language and deployment platform.

The specifications take advantage of an emerging trend called Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA), which structures IT assets as a series of
reusable services that perform business functions. By structuring
applications as a series of services, IT assets become more agile and
organizations are better able to align their investments in dynamic
business environments. For example, using the specifications a mortgage
lender can significantly reduce the complexity of automating the loan
approval process by developing a set of interconnected "services" based
on existing applications tying data on new home owners including credit
reports to processes for ordering home appraisals and rate locking. As a
result, the lender services more customers while providing more value.
In addition, by adopting these specifications organizations gain a
higher degree of investment protection, because they can deploy services
with a variety of middleware technologies. The SOA Programming Model
specifications include the Service Component Architecture (SCA) to
simplify the development of creating business services and Service Data
Objects (SDO) for accessing data residing in multiple locations and
formats.

SCA provides an open, technology neutral model for implementing IT
services that are defined in terms of a business function and make
middleware functions more accessible to the application developer. 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. Vendors working to create
SCA include BEA Systems, IBM, IONA, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, Sybase and Zend
Technologies.

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. Today, a multitude of
APIs are used to manipulate data. These APIs 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. Vendors working to create SDO include BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle,
SAP, Siebel, Sybase, Xcalia and Zend Technologies. The authors of SCA
and SDO are committed to providing royalty free licenses to their
intellectual property that is necessary to implement these
specifications SCA and SDO and are soliciting industry feedback.
Together they offer:

* A Language Neutral Assembly Model specification to simplify the
development and usage of Business Services called: "Service Component
Architecture"

* A Java Language specification for implementing SCA service components

* A C++ Language specification for implementing SCA service components

* A Java Language Service Data Objects specification describing a common
rendering methodology for data exchange between clients and services * A
C++ Language Service Data Objects specification describing a common
rendering methodology for data exchange between clients and services

"Service Infrastructure is a new category of software required for
widespread adoption of SOA, It needs a rich ecosystem of technologies,
standards, processes and partnerships to make it a reality. These new
specifications - the first of their kind - represent significant
progress in helping the industry achieve that goal," said Edward Cobb,
vice president, architecture and standards, BEA Systems. "As an SOA
leader, BEA will continue to drive standards in this area to ensure that
the solid infrastructure we are providing supports composite
applications from services developed on multiple platforms, using
whatever technologies our customer choose. Specifications such as SCA
and SDO help developers spend less time on deployment and maintenance
and more on solving business problems."

"Standards have become a critical component of today's technology
infrastructure," said Karla Norsworthy, vice president, software
standards, IBM Software. "The rapid explosion of data and services has
created challenges for developers to use all the new types of
information. The collection of companies joining forces to create SCA
and SDO will help ease developer pain and increase business results."

"Because the SCA specification addresses significant marketplace and
user requirements for SOA development and deployment infrastructure, it
has the potential to unify service runtime and tooling initiatives such
as ESBs and Eclipse," said Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA. "Our involvement as
a co-author of the SCA specification is a natural fit with IONA's
ongoing participation in standards-based and open source distributed
computing initiatives. Organizations adopting SOA need appropriate,
efficient and cost-effective solutions. Supporting industry standards
such as SCA is one of the ways we are helping our customers accomplish
this."

"Open standards and specifications such as Java Enterprise Edition, Web
services and WS-BPEL play a crucial role in the development of
Service-Oriented Architectures," said Steven G. Harris, vice president,
Java Platform Group, Oracle. "Through our work in standards
organizations and now in unifying those efforts in the SCA and SDO
specifications, Oracle is making it easier for organizations to realize
the concrete benefits a standards based Service-Oriented Architecture
can deliver today and in the future."

"We are dedicated to working with other leading companies to establish
standards that allow customers to compose applications from service and
data components," said Michael Bechauf, vice president of SAP NetWeaver
Industry Standards at SAP. "Today's announcement is another step forward
in our commitment to help customers harness the power of Web services by
leveraging the Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), to optimize
business processes and drive innovation through composite applications."