OSOA: Open SOA Collaboration

On August'06 I had already posted a message about OSOA. David Linthicum, in this article details the progress that this initiative has achieved. As David say, this group has concentrated its efforts on two projects - service component architecture (SCA) and service data objects (SDO).

• SCA is looking to provide a model for creating service components in a wide range of languages and a model for assembling service components in a business solution. In essence this is a standard that defines how services are created so they interact with each other without a lot of customization. This will benefit those who are looking to create composite applications that use these services (...SCA stresses decoupling the service implementation and service assembly from the details of the infrastructure capabilities and the access methods used to invoke services. SCA components operate at a business level, according to the spec);
• SDO is looking to provide a consistent way of handling data in applications, whatever its source or format may be. Okay, that would be data abstraction. Moreover, SDO provides a way to unify data handling for databases and services (...using SDO, application programmers can uniformly access and manipulate data from heterogeneous data sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web Services, and enterprise information systems).

Continuing with SDO goals:

1. Databases are connected to the applications by data mediator services;
2. Client applications query a data mediator service and get a data graph in response;
3. Client applications send an updated data graph to a data mediator service to have the updates applied to the original data source;
4. and this architecture allows applications to deal principally with data graphs and data objects.

(source: SDO for JAVA Specifitation V2.1 FINAL)