Major IT Firms Join to Standardize SOA

by Mary Lou Roberts

Services oriented architecture, or SOA, is the up and coming model for creating and implementing applications in diverse environments. And "diverse environments" is a good description of the collection of vendors that have now united in an effort to develop specifications and resulting collaborative technologies that simplify how organizations create and implement applications in a services oriented architecture.

Last Wednesday, IBM emerged with seven new partners in this initiative: BEA Systems, IONA Technologies, Oracle, SAP, Siebel Systems, Sybase, and Zend Technologies. According to the eight-way joint press release, "Using the SOA Programming Model specifications, organizations can more easily create new and transform existing IT assets into reusable services that may be rapidly adapted to meet changing business requirements. Further, the specifications greatly reduce complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform."

That historical archrivals SAP and Oracle are now sitting together in the same church with IBM and singing from the same hymnbook--at least as far as a programming model for SOA is concerned--is saying something. These folks all compete hard. SOA must, in fact, be a big deal if they're willing to make nice with each other.

SOA has caught on as a buzzword already, but less so as an active implementation initiative. It is, as yet, an emerging trend that the group describes as structuring "IT assets as a series of reusable services that perform business functions. By structuring applications as a series of services, IT assets become more agile and organizations are better able to align their investments in dynamic business environments. . . . By adopting these specifications, organizations gain a higher degree of investment protection, because they can deploy services with a variety of middleware technologies."

The SOA Programming Model specifications put forth by the group incorporate both a "technology-neutral" Service Component Architecture (SCA) to simplify the creation of business services, and Service Data Objects (SDO) for accessing data that resides in multiple locations and formats. SCA will present a model for defining services in terms of business functions, making middleware functions more accessible to the application developer, and it will facilitate the assembly of business solutions from collections of individual services with control over access methods and security. SDO will make it easier to access and manipulate business data. "Today, a multitude of APIs are used to manipulate data. These APIs tend to tightly couple the source and target of the data making their use error-prone and subject to breaking as business requirements evolve. SDO will make it easier to use and realize the value of these APIs without having to code directly to them," the SOA partners said in their announcement.

SCA and SDO are being offered royalty free, with industry feedback invited. Together, they will deliver:

• A Language Neutral Assembly Model specification to simplify the development and usage of Business Services called Service Component Architecture
• A Java Language specification for implementing SCA service components
• A C++ Language specification for implementing SCA service components
• A Java Language Service Data Objects specification describing a common rendering methodology for data exchange between clients and services
• A C++ Language Service Data Objects specification describing a common rendering methodology for data exchange between clients and services

Industry reaction to the initiative is generally positive. But some questions exist. For example, Tom Herman, manager of new business development for looksoftware says, "We at looksoftware believe the backbone to SOA will be through the use of Web services with disparate code and application platforms. Standards such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI already exist for Web services and work with different languages. Web services standards already create an SCA environment."

Karla Norsworthy, vice president of software standards for IBM's Software Group responds: "Clearly, IBM has been a big proponent of the Web services standards. They form the basis to enable interoperability among unlike programming models. That's an important pillar of our SOA approach. That's all about interoperability--all about the line flow. This initiative, however, is all about making the job easier for the person who writes the code. Vendors not only want interoperability among unlike things, they also want to give programmers an easy way to do this, and they want it to be standardized across vendors."

This initiative, which for some strange reason was not given a name so we could talk easily about it, is about more than Web services. "It's about flexibility," Norsworthy says. "The programmer doesn't have to worry about a lot of things like security or transactions. Those can be decisions at deployment time rather than at development time. This will, first, free the programmer up from having to worry so much about the infrastructure, and, second, make it possible to make the quality of service decisions at another time so the business programmer doesn't have to decide, for example, what level of security is required for the transaction."

What about languages? After all, a key theme of SOA is providing a multi-language approach for simplifying development and composition of services. Norsworthy reports that, while Java will be an important part of the group's focus. Also included are C++ and COBOL as well as the open source PHP language that is increasingly used in place of Java on dynamic Web sites. For the time being, however, Norsworthy admits that RPG is not on the "near-term radar screen." However, she doesn't rule out that possibility that RPG will be included in the future, given that RPG is used by a significant set of programmers. "We'd like to bring all those folks forward to an easier way to build and compose services," she says.

Peter Kastner, industry analyst and director of Vericours, an IT consulting firm, brings up the fact that two 800-pound gorillas are missing from the announcement: Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, the latter having control of Java and its own ideas on SOA. "Also prominently missing," he notes, "are the systems management giants Computer Associates and Hewlett-Packard. I conclude that this decade will not bring IT a single, unified development framework that also offers product-level interchangeability of all the SOA components. This would allow IT departments to choose from competitors."

IBM's Norsworthy reports that the group has started "initial conversations" with Sun, and maintains that the unnamed SOA organization's plans for standardization include taking the core specifications to a language-neutral body like OMG or Oasis. "But we anticipate using the Java Community Process as part of the process of standardizing the Java spellings and making sure we get good reference implementations, and obviously test suites from JCP. So we have had some initial conversations with Sun. I've been very encouraged. I think you will see us partnering with Sun," she says. As for CA and HP, Norsworthy says they will be approached and their feedback will be solicited. "That's more work for us to do, to get it out to a broader range of industry partners in this space. That's why it's important to get this published so we can get broader feedback on the table."

There seems to be less hope that Microsoft will join the party. Norsworthy points out that programmers who use SDA and SCL will have Web services that access .NET. "We would welcome Microsoft to the table to talk about standardizing programming interfaces, but at this point, I think Microsoft's strategy is about interoperability and the ability to connect, and less about standardized programming interfaces. We'd welcome them if they want to come, and we're very pleased that we have basic interoperability with them. But we are not engaged in real conversation with Microsoft on this subject."

This leads Kastner to conclude, "In three years, the participants of this initiative will be major players in one galaxy of the SOA universe. But it looks to me as if there will be other galaxies competing for IT attention and dollars. Microsoft would be a big one."

Wayne Kernochen, an analyst with IT research firm Valley View Ventures, agrees that the absence of Microsoft and Sun from the group is a concern, pointing out that IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are the three most likely approaches to be found in an organization. "Initially, no one agreed just what common features Web services should have; each vendor took its own approach to the problem. The result is that, while Web services from these three vendors and others may talk to each other, they use different security schemes that are not coordinated. This, in turn, makes it much more difficult to coordinate IBM, Microsoft, and Sun environments within the same organization."

Nevertheless, Kernochen predicts that the initiative will be a success. If Microsoft does not come on board, of course the prospects for extending it to all environments with modification are doubtful. "However, because this is the right time for such a standard--that is, everyone has enough experience with Web services that all are fairly well agreed as to what should be standardized and hidden from the programmer--even if Microsoft does not buy in, this will be a success in that it improves the life and productivity of the programmer." Kernochen is pleased to see the increased emphasis on data objects--not just Web services. "In general, data access takes up a lot of the life of a programmer. Anything that can speed development of data access can cut as much as 40 percent off the total time for developing a typical major application."

As a long-time industry observer, Kastner praises the effort, pointing out the difficulty in building modern, Web-based applications that touch many business processes. "They are exceedingly difficult to design and program," he says. "Today, these home-grown applications are typically 'brittle' in the sense that any small change in any module can break the whole thing." He concludes, therefore, that the formation of this group is a "noble effort" to drive standards and market acceptance of services-oriented architectures. "It's an important step in the evolution of the SOA ecosystem." Kastner also strongly believes that it makes sense for IBM to be spearheading this effort. "Few shops have all-IBM development tools, let alone applications," notes Kastner. "By consolidating the interests of major software development tool companies, IBM's efforts keep the industry from fragmenting--again--into islands of proprietary development tools, which IT then has to cobble together."

This mirrors an opinion expressed by Kernochen. "While it is not clear whether Sun or Microsoft will eventually take part, this also offers a chance to reverse the trend towards greater separation of these environments due to Web services implementation--and IBM seems to be doing well when users seek to integrate disparate environments."

How long will it take for users to realize benefits from this initiative? Not long, says Norsworthy, who points out that several of the participants already have predecessor code in product, and "we are all working on early code for the industry to experiment with as we evolve these standards."

In fact, for the SDO specification, which is about accessing heterogeneous data and sending that data back and forth across SOA requests from one service to another, Norsworthy says, "that set has been around for a while and we anticipate that within another six months or so that will go to the standards body." However, the SDA specifications--the ones that address how components and containers are built--will take a little longer. "You will probably see a couple more rounds of updates to those specs based on the feedback that we get from partners and from our own experimentation before they are ready to go. From IBM's perspective, we already ship in WebSphere the predecessor functions to SCA and SDO. Speaking for IBM--and I think other vendors have examples as well--we have been shipping some predecessor function that gives us really solid input as to what the ultimate standard will be. Further, over the next 30 days, you'll see more of what's available in the open source community for the broader community to experiment with."

Mary Lou Roberts, a 35-year veteran of the information systems industry, is a new contributor to IT Jungle. In addition to her work as a reporter in the iSeries space, she has spent her career as a marketing and communications professional working exclusively with information technology publications and companies. She can be reached at WriterNewf@aol.com.