Sunday Sep 14, 2008
Evolution of Composite Service Architecture standards
SOA has evolved from hype to a mature set of standards. Am glad that people's thinking is moving it away from Just a Bunch of Web Services (JBOWS) to a more component services architecture. This from a simplistic view means defining clear interfaces for the tiers as the means of interaction. Bindings may be in multiple languages and through different mechanism (ie JSON, WebServices).
Importantly the standards that are evolving are language independent. All be it, outside of the Microsoft world, significant effort has been placed by the major vendors into the two following standards:
- SCA (Service Component Architecture) - provides a programming model for building applications and systems based on a Service Oriented Architecture; and
- SDO (Service Data Objects) - designed to simplify and unify the way in which applications handle data.
They have essentially evolved from the work of the osoa.org (Open Service Oriented Architecture) organisation. I believe since the initial specifications have been released that the work has now been handed over to OASIS Open CSA - Composite Services Architecture.
SDO has become an important technology, over the last few years, in IBM WebSphere for use with JSF (Java Server Faces). Increasingly SCA will become more dominate in middleware components. So its worth the time to learn more about it and experiment.
