The New Age of SCA – Service Component Architecture

In theory, Service Computing Architecture (SCA) is all about Developer productivity, flexibility and control of processes through process orchestration, standard & unified management of business functions through a common service bus, and standard, ubiquitous access to services through use of business service adapters. All of this is underpinned by re-usable services and managed through a common framework and toolset.

In practice, however, this is not always the case. In many SCA deployments, a vast array of different tools are used to develop and deploy the processes and components, such as different UI developers, process orchestration tools, service bus management tools. This can lead to SCA artefacts being too finely grained due to constraints being imposed by the various tools & engines, which in turn leads to unnecessary complexity in the operational management of services due to ‘artificial’ service dependencies.

Service Component Architecture – how does this help?

New generation SCA toolsets such as Oracle’s SCA Suite 11g (launched in July 2009) address the issue of unnecessary operational complexities by deploying an ‘Assembly Model’ for Service Oriented Architecture known as Service Component Architecture (SCA)
SCA defines a standard assembly model for SOA, and client & implementation standards for major SCA languages & technologies (BPEL, Java).

So what is SCA?
Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a Suite of specifications that define a model for building SCA applications. An SCA application is a composite application composed of networks of service components, which provides a greatly simplified component programming model for implementing service components:

• Assembly – defines how to specify the structure of a composite application. This should be a vendor, technology and language neutral representation of a composition and deployment of services.
• Implementation Languages – define how a service is actually written in a particular programming language (e.g. Java, Spring)
• Bindings – define possible methods of access (e.g. Web Service, JMS)
• Policy Framework – defines how to add infrastructure to the framework (e.g. security, transactions)

Oracle SOA Suite 11g and SCA
Oracle’s next generation SOA toolset – SOA Suite 11g, which is to be released in July 2009, embraces the Service Component Architecture model, and will be the first service platform tool to:
• Unify the SOA design-time experience, with the SCA Assembly Editor tool
• Unify SOA runtime, with SOA services infrastructure
• Unify SOA management, using Fusion Middleware Control

Look out for further detailed updates & discussions on the blog once SOA Suite 11g has officially been launched.

Doug Toop
UK Oracle & Open Source Technology Practice Lead