Forrester on SDO/SCA versus JBI
Industry analyst Mike Gilpin (along with Randy Heffner, John R. Rymer) has published an interesting report on the competition between SCA/SDO and JBI.
The key conclusion is that SCA/SDO will emerge as the de facto industry standards if the supporters bring products to market based on the specifications. Even Microsoft will eventually be forced to provide cross compatibility.
Java Business Integration (JBI)
JBI is part of the Java Community Process and defined in JSR 208. JBI is a standard for composing service containers into composite applications. It's very much a Java-centric approach that is very focused (or limited, depending on if you think your cup is half-full or half-empty). Sun Microsystems and TIBCO Software are considered the primary backers of JBI (although Sun is generally considered a key player in most JSRs).
Service Component Architecture and Service Data Objects
SCA and SDO is a very ambitious and broad solution to the composition problem that works for multiple languages and multiple platforms. It's designed to be the universal solution. SCA was introduced in November 2005 by some of the leading industry vendors and is now gaining market support. SCA and SDO are backed by IBM, BEA, Oracle, IONA, SAP, Siebel Systems, and Sybase. All of the backers have Web pages dedicated to the new specifications. It's clear that some of the vendors - particularly IBM, BEA, and SAP are strong supporters.
There's some key points that indicated that SCA/SDO will emerge as the de facto standard:
-IBM and BEA did not support JBI in the JCP. Any Java specification not supported by the two Java industry leaders does not have a chance regardless of technical merits (think JDO)
-SDO is fairly unique in the industry as the only data persistence API for SOA data services. So SDO could in fact drive industry adoption of SCA (Gartner predicts faster SDO market uptake)
-Forrester (rightly) predicts that if the vendors that support SCA/SDO bring out products then it will become the de facto industry standard, regardless of which standards body manages the specifications
The most likely outcome is that that JBI will evolve into a complementary and compatible Java-only version of a subset of the SCA specification.
A bigger question for CodeFutures is what happens to EJB 3.0/JPA with the emergence of SDO?
PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software