Leading technology vendors extend collaboration on SOA technologies

NEW DELHI: Signifying the growing interest in and adoption of Service-Oriented
Architectures (SOAs), several leading technology vendors, who have been
working together to create Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data
Objects (SDO) specifications announced key achievements, including a significant
increase in industry involvement and advancements in the development of SOA-related
specifications and technologies. The group also launched a vendor-neutral Web
site (www.osoa.org) to serve as an information
resource for access to draft specifications, white papers, and for providing a
forum for industry input and feedback.

Since agreeing to work together on new industry specifications to simplify
SOA application development in November 2005, BEA Systems, Inc., IBM,
IONA, Oracle, SAP AG, Sybase,
Xcalia and Zend have been joined by Cape Clear, Interface21, Primeton
Technologies, Progress Software (formerly Sonic Software), Red Hat, Rogue Wave
Software, Software AG, Sun Microsystems and TIBCO Software, Inc.

The new partners on board, the group of 17 organizations spans SOA and
applications companies to infrastructure and open source providers. Together,
they have achieved considerable technical progress in developing SCA and SDO
technologies, including new and updated draft specifications. The SCA
specifications are designed to help simplify the creation and composition of
business services while the SDO specifications focus on uniform access to data
residing in multiple locations and formats.

The group's work has already resulted in the development of new draft SCA
specifications for a declarative policy framework; improved description of
connectivity with bindings specifications for JMS, JCA and Web Services; and new
BPEL and PHP
authoring models. In addition, draft specifications for Service Assembly; Java
and C++ service authoring; and SDO have been updated.

The SCA and SDO specifications can help organizations to more easily create
new and transform existing IT assets, enabling reusable services that may be
rapidly assembled to meet changing business requirements. These specifications
can greatly reduce complexity associated with developing applications by
providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and
deployment platform. Both are emerging technologies designed to simplify the
representation of business logic and business data.