News

OASIS Group To Foster SOA App Development

• By Kurt Mackie
• April 12, 2007

These SOA standardization efforts will be spearheaded by a new group at OASIS called Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA). The Open CSA member section consists of more than 15 companies involved in various aspects of enterprise SOA development.

The main focus of the Open CSA group will be to foster specifications for service component architecture (SCA) and service data objects (SDO) in an SOA. These specs, when released, will be available to the community on a royalty-free basis.

The specs will speed up SOA application development, according to Karla Norsworthy, vice president, IBM Software Standards.

"The adoption of SCA/SDO will provide the missing link between process and data in composite SOA application implementation," Norsworthy stated in an OASIS announcement. "Our customers are enthusiastic about the capabilities of these specifications, which dramatically improve developers' ability to create applications and solutions in an SOA style."

The aim of the SCA effort is to "more easily design and transform IT assets into reusable services," according to an announcement issued by OASIS.

SCA consists of two components (implementation and assembly) that divide an SOA application into steps, thereby helping to speed up development time, according to a description at IBM's Web site.

SDO is a way for programmers to manipulate data from different sources. Those sources might include relational databases, XML sources, Web services and enterprise information systems. SDO helps to simplify the handling of data for applications in an SOA environment, as described at IBM's site.

SCA and SDO were created by an informal alliance of 18 software vendors in an organization called the Open SOA Collaboration, which elected to develop its specifications through OASIS.