Folks,
I think that SCA is a significant advance in application development technologies which is directed
to simplifying the building of agile and adaptable business systems.
Organisations are already reaping benefits from using SCA - IBM customers in particular have been
able to exploit an version of SCA in the WebSphere Process Server and in the WebSphere ESB products
for a couple of years now. We also have customers who are excited about the latest SCA
functionality that is found in the Tuscany project and which IBM has made available as part of the
WebSphere 6.1 SOA Feature Pack. I talked about one of these customers (anonymously) at the recent
OASIS Symposium in Santa Clara - the talk is now posted on the OSOA site here:
http://www.osoa.org/download/attachments/250/Flexible_Agile_Composition_01.pdf
I am sure that many more businesses will benefit as SCA implementations become available from a
wider range of suppliers - TIBCO, Oracle, BEA and Rogue Wave all have products either available or
in late beta stage.
As far as Sun are concerned, I encourage them to provide support for SCA in their products. If they
need to hear more about "what users want" - they could do well to listen to Steve Jones of CapGemini
who was on that SCA Panel at JavaOne and who spoke eloquently about SCA as being of great value in
unifying activities on the large projects that they undertake.
It is curious in some ways that Sun saw value in building runtimes for composite applications and
have pursued the JBI specification for about the same length of time as the OSOA collaboration of
companies developed the SCA specifications. The hole in that approach is that JBI is really a
specification for runtime builders (read "vendors"), providing little in the way of a model for
building applications, which is what customers really care about. Sun would do well to recognise
this and adopt SCA as the application layer which can sit above a JBI runtime.
Interestingly, a couple of guys from Atos Origin gave a talk at JavaOne about their work on exactly
this topic - “The Best Of Both Worlds with Java Business Integration and Service Component
Architecture” presented by Jos Dirksen and Tijs Rademakers. To me, this showed the value and power
of the combination.
I think that the evidence is there that customers already see the benefits of SCA - and that
interest is continuing to grow and should expand rapidly once there is a good range of runtimes and
tools that support the SCA model across the industry. Whether Sun want to see this evidence is
another matter, which I will leave them to think about.
Yours, Mike.
Jeff Anderson wrote:
To everybody out there interested in seeing SCA being more widely adopted.
Recently I posted a general overview of SCA coverage at JavaWorld last
week in San Francisco. Which can be found at
http://agileconsulting.blogspot.com/2008/05/highlights-of-sca-at-javaworld-2008.html
I spoke briefly about the SCA panel that was attended by members of
IBM, Sun SAP and MCd by David Chapelle. After the panel, I had the
chance to briefly speak with Peter Walker of Sun Microsystems
concerning Sun support for SCA. In his opinion, Sun will probably not
support SCA, because in his mind there is no user demand. Peter has
actually invited me to tell him more about "what users want" directly
on my above-mentioned blog entry.
I personally think that having Sun support SCA in a more active
fashion, and incorporating it into the JavaEE world would do a lot to
reduce the noise around "fractures within the Java community"
(especially from Microsoft) and would be excellent for the Java
platform in general.
Is anybody else concerned with Sun's lack of support? Please provide
your comments at
http://agileconsulting.blogspot.com/2008/05/highlights-of-sca-at-javaworld-2008.html
I will make sure to forward your comments over to Peter. Feel free to
share any evidence of the real world adoption of SCA and the value
that it has provided. Be generic when referring to specific clients or
projects if you need to protect the innocent :-).
It would be great if we can provide hard evidence to convince Sun that
SCA is real, valuable, and worth considering.
Of course, I will also share the results of this with the community.
