The proposals in question, Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO), would adapt principles of component-based development to web services. The proposals are just that. No standards body has yet been chosen for them.
But that hasn’t stopped IBM from doing whatever it can to prompt grassroots support for this proposal, which originated within the Apache community. Previously supported by IBM’s WebSphere Process Server, IBM is now extending it as an alpha version to the core of the family: WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 6.1.
With support on WebSphere Appserver, the bleeding edge technologies can now be used with over a hundred other IBM products that already embed the appserver.
Nonetheless, IBM was trying to carefully balance the message that it is making advanced technology available to early adopters with a reassurance to existing WebSphere customers that it is not rushing out new technologies to force upgrades.
With the product [WebSphere] almost 8 to 10 years old, we’re at the point where customers are telling us to ship new releases less frequently, said Mark Heidl, program director for WebSphere infrastructure product management.
In other words, customer said, stop constantly trickling out new features that force us to upgrade. Yet at the same time, IBM wants to keep those new goodies available to customers who want to experiment with the bleeding edge.
It’s unclear how the early release of SCA and SDO support work towards that goal, because, Heidl said the new features would enter general availability before WebSphere 7.0, the next major release, comes out.
Regardless, it wouldn’t hurt for the technologies in question to become officially sanctioned first.
