OpenCSA Plenary Kick-starts SCA Standardization Effort

Posted by Mark Little on Aug 22, 2007

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Service Component Architecture

Almost 2 years after first being released on the world, OASIS announced that the formation of 6 new technical committees dedicated to the various aspects of SCA. In case you hadn't heard about SCA, Anne Thomas Manes, VP and Research Director of Burton summarizes:

"SCA is based on the idea that business functions are provided as a series of services that can be wired together to create solutions for particular business needs. These composite applications can contain new services created specifically for the application and reuse existing business functions from existing systems. SCA offers the potential to streamline the SOA design process by enabling the delivery of easy-to-use tools developers need to transform IT assets into reusable services."

The 6 committees are: SCA-Assembly, SCA-Bindings, SCA-BPEL, SCA-C-C++, SCA-J and SCA-Policy. More TCs may be created as other areas of SCA are developed. James Bryce Clark, director of standards development at OASIS added:

"These six OASIS SCA TCs plan to address the tough 'last mile' of SOA project implementation. If a group of software engineers want to compose two specific services into an application using C and BPEL, for example, they'll face some challenging design choices. The SCA TCs plan to provide practical help, in the form of language bindings, a policy framework, and code patterns."

The Plenary, to be hosted by SAP and co-sponsored by Oracle, will be the place where these technical committees really get going. But there's an "open day" at the start, where people can attend and learn about SCA and the advantages it provides. We've discussed SCA several times in the past and it often generates heated debates. Now that there are very few weeks left before SCA development opens up to all comers (well, all OASIS members), it will be interesting to see how many people from outside the original author companies get involved and to what extent they try to push changes. The Plenary will be a very important event for several reasons, as it will act as one measure of interest.

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