SCA 1.0.1 Beta Refresh Available

Service Component Architecture has 2 primary mechanisms for vendors to extend the basic assembly model: access ways to and from services (bindings) and adding new implementation kinds that can be assembled and composed using SCDL (implementations).

For this update of the beta code, available here, we've been able to augment our original beta drop with additional support in both directions:

Bindings:

• Web 2.0 bindings for JSON-RPC and ATOM services.
• Additional support for JMS over WebSphere MQ.

Implementations:

• OSOA support for implementation.jee.
  
• UI components which support html/javascript implementations where SCA is used to wire together browser interactions with services available over JSON-RPC and ATOM. This support uses DOJO subroutines to accomplish the JavaScript wiring.
• We have begun our work on implementation.spring to encapsulate, expose and compose your Spring applications as services in your enterprise's SOA. I'll note for the record we are not shipping the Spring framework with WebSphere and you'll have to get the Spring Framework (2.5.5) from SpringSource.
  

But Wait! There's more... Thrown into the mix of new capabilities we've added support for:

• using SCA annotations in JEE components so you can leverage SCA directly in your JEE applications.
• using SDO 2.1.1 which derives its implementation from our new XML core provided by the XML Feature Pack for WAS V7.

That's quite a lot of new support to chew on, and the team worked hard to remove many of the restrictions that were part of the first beta of 1.0.1 and even delivered a virtual machine image of the beta if installing software isn't your bag.

Finally, the early programs site which supports our beta has a lot of collateral like white papers and demos as well as a forum to answer your questions.

I can't think of how to make a beta much easier to get feedback than we've tried to make this delivery -- if there's still an inhibitor that you're experiencing that we could do different and make your life easier, my team is all ears.

We look forward to your feedback and your participation.

Open SCA 1.0.1 Beta Available!

The Open SCA Feature Team has just released a beta milestone for a refresh of Open SCA support for WebSphere Application Server V7. The new level of code adds an implementation for JMS bindings for the default messaging provider as well as JEE integration scenarios where JEE applications can be enriched with SCA annotations and leverage the SCA SOA programming model benefits from within your JEE applications. Similar to the SCA 1.0.0 Feature Pack available since Dec 2008, the implementation derives its architectural direction from specifications at OSOA and source origins are derived from the open source project Apache Tuscany.

The beta milestone is available externally here and as usual with WebSphere Beta programs comes with a support forum for Q&A. Happy SOA Programming!

Steve Kinder

TCs created at OASIS for SCA

Well, not the timeliest blog ever, but I did want to mention to folks if they hadn't heard yet that the SCA architecture established by the OSOA organization has been accepted by OASIS for standardization and technical communities within the Open Composite Services Architecture Member Section as documented here.

This is the result of a lot of effort from my colleagues from IBM as well as contributors from the many vendors that comprise the OSOA organization. I look forward to the enrichment of a standards process to refining this technology into the valuable, open, multilingual SOA architecture we envisioned several years ago. Great progress!! and evidence that while this technology is not rolling out as fast as some of us would like, the value proposition and promise remains strong.

It really is Christmas Early... or is that Holiday Season?

Hot off the presses, a refresh of the latest externally available beta drop of the SOA Feature Pack for WebSphere V6.1 is available here. This feature pack leverages the Apache Tuscany open source technology from the Apache Incubator project to provide an implementation of the published Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Object (SDO) specifications implemented at by the OSOA Collaboration of vendors.
If you haven't heard of SCA and SDO, where have you been? :-) We are very interested in getting feedback on what we are doing right, but especially what we are doing wrong with these new SOA related programming and assembly model concepts.

Happy Coding...

Steve Kinder

p.s. I forgot to mention that the SOA Feature Pack installation also installs the Web Service Feature Pack, as we base our Web Service support on the new AXIS-2 runtime. If you happen to download the SOA Feature Pack, you get both feature packs.