A group of 18 vendors in the service-oriented architecture space has announced that some of the key Service Component Architecture and Service Data Objects specifications have completed incubation and will be formally submitted to OASIS to become standards.

The SCA specifications are aimed at simplifying the creation and composition of services, critical to building applications using services. And the SDO specifications are designed to enable uniform access to data residing in multiple locations. The group, known as the Open SOA Collaboration, has decided to turn the Java-based SDO work over to the JCP (Java Community Process) and turn the non-Java SDO work over to OASIS.

"We applaud the Open SOA Collaboration for reaching this milestone and for choosing to take the next step and advance this important work through an open standards process," said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS, in Billerica, Mass.

The SCA and SDO specifications can help organizations to more easily create new IT assets and transform existing ones, enabling reusable services to be rapidly assembled. The specifications also reduce complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform.

Since November 2005, 18 companies have joined the effort to work on new industry specifications aimed at simplifying SOA application development, including BEA Systems, Cape Clear, IBM, Interface21, IONA, Oracle, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software, Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, SAP, Siemens, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, TIBCO Software, and Xcalia.

"As a founding partner in the SCA/SDO collaboration, Oracle is pleased at how quickly we have reached our goal of maturing these specifications and that OASIS has agreed to move them forward into industry standards," said Don Deutsch, vice president of Standards Strategy and Architecture at Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle, in a statement.

Also in a statement, Jim Rivera, vice president of product management at Cape Clear Software, of San Mateo, Calif., said: "The submission of SCA to OASIS is a significant milestone for this important technology. SCA addresses the need for a comprehensive, cross-platform component model for SOA. We look forward to collaborating with other partners through OASIS to shape the SCA specification and ensure that our customers can realize the full benefits of SOA."

Click here to read about what happens when you mix Web services, SOA and open source.

Meanwhile, "Rogue Wave Software uses SCA to bring concurrent computing to existing applications without requiring expensive upgrades or the removal of existing technologies," said Patrick Leonard, vice president of product development at Rogue Wave Software, in Boulder, Colo., in a statement. "Next month, Rogue Wave Software is slated to launch the first product commercially available for deploying high-performance SOA applications based on SCA – allowing users to increase performance and scalability, take advantage of multicore technologies and maximize IT investments."

Yet, Eric Newcomer, chief technology officer at IONA Technologies, of Waltham, Mass, said when SCA started, IONA was "very eager" to join and participate in the collaboration. "We felt that in particular the assembly specification would be a very significant contribution to SOA standardization," he said and added that IONA has started to use it in the Eclipse STP (SOA Tools Platform) project and in its Artix product line.

"However, we also felt—and said at the time—that we were concerned about the possibility that SCA would trade one complexity for another," Newcomer said. "I just don't think customers are that interested in 'the next big thing' anymore when it comes to programming models. We always felt that the best thing for SCA to do would be to push as much of its functionality into the assembly specification as possible and minimize the amount of annotations added to Java code."

Next Page: The main contribution of SCA.