Search This Blog

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Burton Cautiously Optimistic about SCA for SOA

The analysts who cover service-oriented architecture (SOA) for Burton
Group Inc. have some reservations about the Service Component
Architecture (SCA) specification, but have concluded the vendor backing
is so strong "adoption may be inevitable." Touted as "a new programming
model for SOA" by its vendor sponsors led by IBM and now making its
way through the OASIS standards process, SCA is not yet baked into many
products beyond IBM's WebSphere, but Burton analysts expect adoption
to pick up in 2008. Given its apparent inevitability as a vendor
supported standard, Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research
director at Burton, spent more than an hour Tuesday in a Web seminar
explaining SCA's potential promise and problems to clients. She said
the concerns about SCA at Burton Group include the fact that SCA is
made up of more than 14 specifications. Analysts are skeptical that
the various technical committees working on those specifications can
reach the goal of creating an overall standard to "simplify" service
creation and composition. This leads to concern that SCA could suffer
the same fate as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA),
which failed to achieve its promise in the 1990s because, as one analyst
put it, "too many cooks spoiled the broth." "There is some concern that
SCA can hide all the complexities," she said. The good news is that SCA
has potential, yet unproven, to be a language-and protocol-independent
programming model for SOA. Languages that will be supported in SCA cover
most of those a non-Microsoft coder would be working on today, ranging
from COBOL to Ruby. Support is planned for Java, including Plan Old Java
Objects (POJO), Spring, Enterprise Java Beans, C, C++, BPEL and PHP. More Information See also OASIS SCA-TCs: Click Here

No comments: