Folks,
My input as
<mje>...</mje>
Yours, Mike.
Strategist - Emerging Technologies, SCA & SDO.
IBM Hursley Park, Mail Point 146, Winchester, SO21 2JN, Great Britain.
Phone & FAX: +44-1962-818014 Mobile: +44-7802-467431
Email:
Mark Little <>
03/09/2007 12:01
To
cc
Subject
[opencsa-ms] Questions for InfoQ interview
Here are the questions for the InfoQ interview. Please
feel free to answer any and all. If you do answer any question, please
put your full name and position within your company and role within SCA/OpenCSA
at the start of any reply: that way I can link the information into the
finished article. Please send answers to me directly and then I'll follow
up on a one-on-one basis if necessary.
Thanks,
Mark.
Q: Why do you think it has taken so long for SCA to get
to a standards body?
<mje>I don't think
that SCA has taken long to get to a standards body. SCA started from
scratch to address problems
and opportunities in the
SOA space. It was evolved by a group of collaborators and this involved
not only creation
of the specifications but
also implementations in parallel to check the specifications and provide
useful feedback.
Only once the specifications
were mature and we had the confidence that the specifications were pretty
solid did it
make sense to move forward
to a standards body. That time is now.</mje>
Q: Why OASIS and not W3C?
<mje>The choice of
a standards body to use for any specification is not a straightforward
one. However, SCA is
primarily about a programming
model, rather than on-the-wire protocols, and we felt that OASIS has a
good track
record in this area - for
example the WS-BPEL specification - and that OASIS also offered a structure
well suited
to the parallel group of
technical committees that SCA needs.</mje>
Q: Why is SCA-J not being worked on within the JCP?
<mje>SCA as a whole
is not a Java specification - it is an SOA specification spanning many
techologies both Java
and non-Java. It
did not seem to make much sense to split away the SCA Java specifications
from the other SCA
specifications, making
liaison between the Java group and the other groups more difficult. It
also keeps all the
SCA specifications available
under one, easy to understand license.</mje>
Q: If you had to summarize what SCA brings to this space
in two sentences, what would they be?
<mje>A language for
describing composite services applications. A simple approach to
the construction of service
components, concentrating
on business function and keeping infrastructure concerns well separated.</mje>
Q: Why is your company interested in SCA?
<mje>We believe that
SCA is an important building block in the use of SOA to build business
applications. It will
make SOA more consumable
and it will create a common pool of skills that companies can draw on to
build
their systems.</mje>
Q: Do you see any overlap between SCA and JBI?
<mje>In a word, no.
SCA is primarily concerned with building end-user applications using
a very wide range of
technologies. JBI
is more concerned with building the infrastructure for heterogeneous service
applications on
the Java platform. SCA
can be used on a JBI runtime, but it is also possible to use SCA without
JBI and JBI
without SCA.</mje>
Q: Is there an equivalent of SCA within Microsoft's arsenal
of SOA technologies?
<mje>Windows Communication
Framework (WCF) has some of the features of the SCA service component model,
but there is no real equivalent
of the SCA assembly model for the composition of applications.</mje>
Q: How do you see SCA evolving now it is in a standards
process? Will it change much, or do you think it is close to being complete
as it is?
<mje>Our expectation
is that SCA will not change a great deal from the current 1.0 specifications.
The major task of the
OASIS technical committees
is to create detailed conformance statements and associated test suites
that will help assure
portability and interoperability
between conforming implementations of SCA from different suppliers. That
is going to
be something of real value
to end-users.</mje>
Q: One of the objections to SCA that was leveled early
on was that it competed against JEE. Now that Sun are involved it would
see that any such comments were unfounded. Is that correct?
<mje>It is perfectly
possible to use JEE components and applications within an overall application
composed using SCA,
where other technologies
are also used. SCA even has a specification for doing this.
So I'd say that SCA works with JEE
rather than competing.
SCA does acknowledge that there is more in a typical business environment
than JEE - that is very
much part of the world
of SOA.</mje>
Q: Are there other areas of SCA that have not yet reached
a level of maturity for donation to OASIS? If so, can you give us an idea
of what they might be?
<mje>The Open SOA
collaboration is continuing to discuss aspects of SCA that have not reached
maturity. Some will directly
be part of the OASIS technical
committee discussions. Examples include a Pub/Sub and Eventing model
for the Assembly
specification. Others,
such as the relationship of SCA to management facilities and SCA specifications
for some Scripting languages
are at a much earlier stage
of discussions and will evolve initially outside OASIS until they are suitably
mature.</mje>
Q: Is you company an SCA developer, user, or both?
<mje>Both. IBM
builds products that provide SCA, but IBM also has a services arm that
builds solutions using SOA
for our customers.</mje>
Q: Where do you see SCA fitting within your company's
SOA strategy?
<mje>It is an important
aspect of the core products that support building SOA applications.</mje>
Q: Why isn't Microsoft involved? Since SCA is supposed
to be language agnostic and embraces many of the WS-* technologies that
Microsoft has been involved with, it would seem that their support would
be necessary to make this a meaningful standard?
<mje>Microsoft are
free to join the OASIS SCA activities at any time and we would welcome
them. SCA is a meaningful standard without Microsoft's involvement
and SCA is able
to support implementations
on the Microsoft platforms, even if not supplied by Microsoft.</mje>
Q: What is your role within the various OpenCSA technical
committees?
<mje>Is this meant
to be a personal question or a company question????...</mje>
Q: Do you see SCA collaborating or influencing other standards
activities elsewhere?
<mje>Yes. There
are a variety of other standards which relate to SCA. Some of those
will influence SCA,
others SCA may influence.
An example are the standards involved in management of systems, since
when
an SCA application is managed.
it will be most useful for the management interfaces to reflect the SCA
strucuture of the applications.</mje>
Q: The OpenCSA Plenary week is coming soon. What do you
hope will be the output from that series of meetings?
<mje>The Open CSA
plenary week will see the launch of the 6 SCA technical committees. The
output of the week will set
the pattern of the work
on SCA for the next year or so. In addition, for those folk new to
SCA, the plenary week will offer the
opportunity for some great
free education on SCA from experts who have been involved from the start.</mje>
----
Mark Little
JBoss, a Division of Red Hat
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