If you check out this news item, you'll see that:

"An alliance of leading software vendors Wednesday announced progress on specifications to define a language-neutral programming model for application development within SOA (service-oriented architecture) environments."

In essence, they are proposing a new standard to create and manage IT making the process of integrating different third-party SOA technologies "less onerous."

BEA Systems Inc., IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG first got together in November to begin work on the common programming model along with Iona Technologies PLC, Sybase Inc., Xcalia SA and Zend Technologies Ltd. Others are joining the mix, include Software AG and Red Hat.

Under the banner of Open SOA collaboration, the vendors have concentrated their efforts on two projects -- service component architecture (SCA) and service data objects (SDO).

Form their Web site it seems that SCA is looking to provide a model for the creation of service components in a wide range of languages and a model for assembling service components into a business solution. Okay, that would be orchestration, correct?

SDA is looking to provide consistent means of handling data within applications, whatever its source or format may be. Okay, that would be data abstraction. Moreover, SDO provides a way of unifying data handling for databases and for services.

New? No. Interesting? Sure. We've seen these types of standards before with the rise of client/server, CORBA, and Java, all looking to provide standard mechanisms of development for SOA, or the way we bind all of these things together to form applications. The SDA concept has been done to death, specially, with some successes and some classic failures.

The real battle to be won here is developer's acceptance of these standards, as always. For that, the vendors need to work together to implement the standards in the very same way...something that's been tough to do in the past. Thus, they'll need to put aside their desire to stand out and focus on being the same...an unnatural act for most.

Also, it will be interesting to see where this standard goes in context of BPEL and other standards that provide the same solution patterns. At the end of the day standards are only useful if there is one for each problem pattern. Thus far in the world of SOA we have 3 or more standards for each problem pattern. Those who consume the technology won’t touch standards until the problem is solved. Once bitten, twice shy.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on July 31, 2006 07:04 AM