Open source Tuscany framework project: maybe not innovative but out front in the market - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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February 07, 2008
Open source Tuscany framework project: maybe not innovative but out front in the market

As discussed here last month, one of the recent knocks against open source software (OSS) has been that it simply reverse engineers proprietary technologies at some time period after the proprietary technology becomes popular, in effect inhibiting further innovation and “mopping up” what’s left of a market demand. There are examples of such OSS projects. But it’s not a universal truth.

As I indicated in a recent article, the original Apache HTTP server came on the scene just about coincident with the proprietary Netscape equivalent. “Apache” did not play a mopping-up-old-technology role (although it did clean clock Netscape pretty much) and for a time it did create a separate new middleware market.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Tuscany project also seems equally well timed to current market need. On February 5, 2008, the ASF Tuscany team rolled out the 1.1 release of its Java Service Component Architecture (SCA) project. It’s a runtime environment based on the SCA set of specifications being standardized by OASIS as part of the Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA).

The overall effort—both the projects and the standards—are aimed at simplifying SOA application development.

SCA first came out in November 2005 when IBM, BEA and others announced that they were working on it together. It goes hand in hand with the Service Data Objects (SDO) standard focused on uniform access to data residing in multiple locations and formats. In total some 17 suppliers also including SAP, Oracle/BEA, Progress and TIBCO that preach SOA as a design approach for their own product development took it where they wanted to go: developing standards to cut their development costs to increase their profits and/or allow them to reduce cost of ownership and build up the IT market (see more research at my investment research outlet, Research 2.0—button at right).

What it means is that these companies—as they have been trying to since the 1980s via Atlas, OMG, OSF, Xopen and so forth—agreed to put gas pedals under the right foot, agreed that red means stop in brake lights, agreed to simplify translation between metric and imperial measures, and so forth (while at the same time agreeing that they will always disagree on which side of the road to drive on, which side to put the steering wheel on, and so forth).

Then in March 2007, the suppliers, having reached their goals, turned their standards efforts over to OASIS. Enter Apache. The Tuscany project team (admittedly many of whom work for the same companies that originally collaborated on the standard) began working on an OSS instance that met the standard. The Tuscany SCA Java 1.1 release this week adds a number of features to the November 2007 release including a JMS binding, improved policy support and an implementation extension for representing client-side Javascript applications as SCA components.

Tuscany is still an incubation effort at ASF, sponsored by the Apache Web services PMC.