Large vendors throwing weight behind SOA standards

A group of high-profile technology suppliers is attempting to develop a set of standards that would make it easier to create—and deploy—service-oriented architectures (SOA). If they succeed, SOA adoption could accelerate.

An SOA is a technology infrastructure in which software applications are broken into modular components—called services—and placed in a repository where they can be easily accessed either by users or other services. When done properly, a company can implement new business processes almost at will by writing procedures that call for specific sets of services to interact with one another.

Problems can arise, however, when users try to connect services that were not developed in the exact same manner. "People haven't understood—until they've had a few failures—that you can create an SOA in a thousand ways," says Daryl Plummer, VP and chief fellow at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. "Though there are many ways to implement them, many don't deliver the consistent value that SOA promises."

That's the problem the vendor group hopes to address with its proposed set of service component architecture (SCA) specifications. This consortium—which includes such high-profile names as IBM, BEA Systems, SAP, and Oracle—released an initial set of specifications last December. It is seeking industry comment on those initial specifications with the intention of revising them for submission to a standards body later this year.

The SCA consortium hopes to achieve two fundamental goals: to create a method of developing services that allows separating business logic from the code that tells a service how to interact with other services, and to devise a set of application programming interfaces that streamline the process of extracting data from services.

Accomplishing these goals would permit those service developers to concentrate solely on creating the functionality they need to implement new business process, without worrying about how their services will communicate with services built in other languages, or on other technology platforms.

"Right now, SOA is mostly a concept," says Ed Cobb, VP of standards and architecture at BEA. "A key part in making that concept successful—providing a real infrastructure for an SOA—is having a platform based on widely accepted standards. To do that, you need support from other application and infrastructure vendors."

As Gartner's Plummer concludes, "What these vendors are trying to do represents a positive step. Whether they will be successful is another question."