Sometimes a great joke never dies. Just substitute “Web” for “Unix” in the following canonical one-liner and you’ll see what I mean: “The nice thing about Unix standards is that there are so many to choose from.”
Components, data, and protocols, oh my. It’s too much for developers to bear. With the rise of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) as the foundation for building and deploying applications, a bewildering array of choices for developers can be streamlined with the creation of standards for services.
A press release listed the high-tech firepower being brought to bear on the issue of developing web service standards: Oracle, IBM, BEA, SAP, Zend, Iona, Siebel, Xcalia, and Sybase. Once developed, the standards specification will help bring structure to the various applications constructed upon the SOA and its series of reusable services.
The standards will be called the SOA Programming Model. Two components called SCA and SDO were devised by several of the collaborators listed, and help in developing applications built on reusable services and in getting to data across disparate databases.
Service Component Architecture (dubbed SCA, with what we hope will be apologies to the Society for Creative Anachronism) provides the simplification needed for developers to tap the various reusable pieces available and build business services. The group defined it this way:
SCA provides an open, technology neutral model for implementing IT services that are defined in terms of a business function and make middleware functions more accessible to the application developer. SCA also provides a model for the assembly of business solutions from collections of individual services, with control over aspects of the solution such as access methods and security.
Service Data Objects (SDO) aspires to supercede the API model. The technology complements SCA in delivering a method to access data across platforms and in multiple locations:
he specification reduces the skill levels and time required to access and manipulate business data. Today, a multitude of APIs are used to manipulate data. These APIs tend to tightly couple the source and target of the data making their use error-prone and subject to breaking as business requirements evolve. SDO makes it easier to use and realize the value of these APIs without having to code directly to them.
Most importantly, the creators of these technologies plan to make them available with royalty-free licensing terms. Those creators plan to create specifications implementing SCA and SDO for Java and C++, as well as the Language Neutral Assembly Model for SCA.
“Standards have become a critical component of today’s technology infrastructure,” Karla Norsworthy, VP software standards, IBM Software, said in a statement. “The rapid explosion of data and services has created challenges for developers to use all the new types of information. The collection of companies joining forces to create SCA and SDO will help ease developer pain and increase business results.”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
