04/11/2007

OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced the formation of the Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA) Member Section, a new initiative to advance standards that simplify Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application development. Open CSA will promote the further development and adoption of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) families of specifications, which will be provided to the community on a Royalty Free basis.

ebizQ received the following:

SCA helps organizations more easily design and transform IT assets into reusable services that can be rapidly assembled to meet changing business requirements. SDO lets application programmers uniformly access and manipulate data from heterogeneous sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web services, and enterprise information systems.

Gartner analysts, Daniel Sholler, Jess Thompson, and Yefim V. Natis observed, "SCA is an ambitious initiative, intended to offer mainstream software projects an easy-to-use way to deploy consistently well-designed, multiplatform service-oriented business applications." In their 26 March 2007 report, "Long-Awaited SCA Initiative Begins to Gain Momentum," the analysts note that, "This approach would simplify the design and deployment of services and establish a 'transportable' set of engineering skills for SOA design. [SCA would] enable many of the static analysis features that developers have come to expect in programming environments, but that have been absent in services (such as dependency analyses and type checking)."

Both SCA and SDO were created by the Open SOA Collaboration, an informal group of 18 software vendors. After successfully shepherding the specifications through their incubation phase, these vendors selected OASIS as the most effective venue for advancing SCA and SDO through the open standardization process.

"OASIS appreciates the work of the Open SOA Collaboration to see these specifications through their incubation stage and then contribute them into the open standards process," noted OASIS president and CEO, Patrick Gannon. "Advancing this work within OASIS will enable the SCA and SDO specifications to receive input from a broader international community of software developers, systems integrators, and users. The Open CSA Member Section will be able to coordinate the standardization of multiple specifications, provide education, and promote implementation in order to achieve the most extensive industry adoption of this work."

The Open CSA Member Section will oversee several new OASIS Technical Committees for the SCA and SDO families of specifications. Everyone is invited to participate in this work. Charters for these new Committees will be available in the coming weeks.

Members of the Open CSA Member Section include Active Endpoints, Avaya, BEA Systems, Hitachi, IBM, Oracle, Primeton, Progress Software, Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, SOA Software, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO, Xcalia, and others.