For Application Development & Program Management Professionals (Length: 6 pages)

March 30, 2006

Emerging SOA Standards: SCA/SDO And JBI

Multiple Alternatives Aim To Ease SOA Implementation

by Mike Gilpin

with Randy Heffner, John R. Rymer

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is hot, driving vendors to develop SOA technology faster than the development of standards that govern composition of services on multiple platforms. The result? Customer pain in the form of more complex and brittle composition of heterogeneous services and extra cost in the form of middleware to manage these complex exchanges. Customers are encountering these issues more often now that they are moving down the SOA road in much greater numbers and with more strategic intent. Although vendors have been listening, they don't yet speak with one voice, so a range of standards has been proposed to address these issues, namely service component architecture (SCA) with service data objects (SDOs) and Java business integration (JBI). The industry split may be resolved, but today there is no clear heir apparent to the standards' throne.