Article: The Holy Grail of services: SCA

John Hunt just published an article around SOA and SCA.

How many times lately have you come across a column on Service Oriented Architecture (or SOA)? Or an article telling you that SOA is the next big thing? Or that SOA is the way we should all be building systems?

Personally, it seems to happen to me all the time. Recently, I was in a hotel in Frankfurt, and was waiting in the lobby to meet up with a colleague for dinner, when I picked a business magazine form a table in the lobby. The headline article on the front of the (English language) magazine was all about SOA!

And around SCA Implementations

SCA Implementations

There are currently at least two SCA implementations that you might like to take a look at. The first is the Apache Tuscany incubator project – you can download it here. This project provides a reference implementation of the core features of SCA. At present, SCA supports Java and C++ (although it should be noted that the SCA standard is intended to support a wider range of languages and environments). Tuscany also provides an implementation of the Service Data Object (SDO) standard that is used within SCA to handle different forms of data within services. It also provides an implementation of the Data Access Service (DAS) that provides a service interface to relational databases.

IBM offers another implementation of the SCA standard, as part of its Feature Pack for SOA for WebSphere 6.1. This is built on top of Tuscany and can be viewed as a customisation of Tuscany that simplifies SCA projects when deployed to WebSphere.