Apache Tuscany recently released it's first milestone.
Tuscany provides open source implementations for the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Object (SDO) specifications and a Data Access Service that supports SDO. This Apache incubated project provides runtimes for both Java (on Tomcat) and C++. The Eclipse SOA Tools Project (STP) has stated its intention to provide tooling support for the platforn neutral specification.
The companies that first announced support for SCA include BEA Systems, IBM Corporation, IONA Technologies, Oracle, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Sybase, Xcalia and Zend Technologies.
SCA is a technology neutral way to express business level assemblies of components in order to make integrating services and applications easier. SCA manages infrastructure complexities such as transactions, security and reliable messaging and frees the developer to focus on providing business functions. The solutions developed using SCA can be changed declaratively to alter infrastructure capabilities or application configuration properties to meet changing business requirements.
SCA follows this by introducing a small API and a collection of annotations for adding various things to POJOs such as:
- lifecycle annotations
- dependency injection annotations
- messaging annotations
- SCA specific injections
SCA is not a standard and has not been submitted to any standards body at this time. Analyst Dana Gardner provided a mixed review of SCA, particularly noting that both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are not present in the list of companies announcing SCA. Mark Little from JBoss/RedHat provided on his blog a helpful review of how SCA relates to other specifications. Edwin Kodabakchian of Oracle (a member of SCA) provides a perspective on how SCA relates to JBI.