More software vendors have joined a service-oriented architecture collaboration.
The original vendors, BEA Systems, IBM, IONA, Oracle (and Siebel), SAP, Sybase, Xcalia, and Zend, announced the concepts back in November 2005. The new announcement brings nine new partners into the mix – Cape Clear, Interface21, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software (as an aside, Sonic Software is now taking on its parent’s branding), Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, and Tibco.
Consequently, many of the industry’s major players are now co-operating on building these into more formal specifications that can then be submitted to a standards body – hopefully by the end of the year.
There is, of course, a fairly major non-participant – Microsoft. Given the strong focus on web services as the method by which services can be assembled into composite applications within the service component architecture (SCA) specification, this should at least permit any web service to be included, and the service data objects (SDO) definition could also permit access to data objects via Microsoft’s ADO.NET as well. So a degree of interoperability will be there, but currently there is still a strong bias towards the Java camp.
A new website for open service-oriented architecture (SOA) – www.osoa.org – has also been launched. This is a collaborative website where participants and interested parties are collectively working on a series of specifications that are made available to the industry on a royalty-free licensing basis, of which SCA and SDO are the first. There are likely to be more covering aspects such as process modeling and management, and SOA management and governance.
As always, the devil will be in the detail, but getting such a large number of industry big-hitters to work together is a promising start to getting SOA to become what it rightly should be – a major step change in IT infrastructure.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
