Standards body streamlines SOA work

A key standards body defining specs for building service-oriented enterprise applications last week shuffled the deck by creating six new committees to oversee the development of SOA standards.

The OASIS consortium detailed six new technical committees within its Open Composite Architecture member section. The groups are working on a variety of standards to enable new ways of building applications using service components typically delivered via distributed application and network architectures.

New service-oriented application approaches could open up key new roles for carriers in enabling, building and delivering new enterprise apps.

“SCA is based on the idea that business functions are provided as a series of services that can be wired together to create solutions for particular business needs. These composite applications can contain new services created specifically for the application and reuse existing business functions from existing systems,” said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director for Burton Group, in a statement detailing the new standards committees.

The six technical committees include SCA-Assembly; SCA-Policy; SCA-Bindings; SCA-BPEL; SCA-C-C++; and SCA-Java. The committees—featuring members from Oracle, IBM, BEA Systems and other vendors—are tackling a variety of tasks including defining a core service composition model as well as standards for defining the message, security, transaction and business process components of service-based applications.

Additional information on the new technical committees is available on the OASIS Web site.