CodeFutures Corporate Weblog

SCA and SDO Case Study

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:06:46 +0000

Rich Seeley has produced perhaps the first case study about Service Data Objects and Service Component Architecture called "SCA and SDO become SOA essentials for banking system".

How useful are the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications? Alan Walters, CTO at Cachet Solutions LLC., says his bank processing system couldn't run without them

Vendors in the Open SOA group that developed SCA and SDO, and submitted them to the OASIS and JCP standards bodies late last month, have argued the specs are already mature enough to be implemented in service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications. Walters has done just that.

The article goes on to explain the architectural decisions made by Cachet Solutions.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

FireStorm/DAO 3.2 BETA

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:30:16 +0000

The BETA of FireStorm/DAO 3.2 is available for download.

FireStorm/DAO now installs correctly on Windows Vista.

There is one important release note: FireStorm/DAO user interface now requires JDK 1.5.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Dana Gardner on SCA/SDO and OASIS

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:00:24 +0000

Dana Gardner is the first industry analyst to comment on the announcement that SCA and SDO are being submitted to OASIS. The title of the article, "SCA/SDO goes to OASIS, could be to SOA what Java EE was to n-tier computing" pretty well summarizes Gardner's analysis of the important of SDO/SCA and the move to make them a formal industry standard.

Garner makes an important point about SCA/SDO that explains why they are not Java-only and part of the JCP.

SCA/SDO are designed to provide a common way to alleviate the complexity of adopting SOA across heterogeneity of services types and origins

Gardner also provides a rather sweeping conclusion:

This move shows an aggressive path for major vendors to making SOA the basis for modern computing, and for seeking a powerful standards and compliance force in the market to promote heterogeneity in the production, use, compositing, and extension of applications and data services. This may well form a turning point in the embrace and use of SOA as enterprises recognize the large investment the majority of large IT vendors are making, as well as the steps they are taking to foster open standards for extended levels of interoperability and common programmability of services.

So is this the J2EE moment for SOA Web Services? The answer is yes if important vendors at the top end of the market like IBM, SAP, Rogue Wave, and Oracle have their way.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

SCA Submitted to OASIS

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:57:36 +0000

The OSOA has announced that the Service Component Architecture specifications to OASIS.

The C++ Service Data Object specification has also been submitted to OASIS, with the Java version going to JCP.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Microsoft Joins OpenAjax Alliance

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 10:39:46 +0000

Microsoft has joined the OpenAjax Alliance, which already has an impressive list of supporters including major industry vendors such as Google, IBM, Novell, Oracle, Yahoo, Red Hat and leading AJAX specialists like JackBe.

The significance of the announcement is that AJAX is now the very much established as the leading technology for rich, Web-based clients.

An interesting part of the discussion of Microsoft joining the OpenAjax Alliance is that Microsoft is claiming that they more or less invented AJAX!

Some might say it is only fitting that Microsoft should join the group that is helping to advance AJAX, as much of the technology in AJAX-style development originated at Microsoft, the company claims.

Indeed, Adam Bosworth, now a vice president at Google but formerly a key software architect at Microsoft, spoke at a Google event in January and described the process of creating AJAX at Microsoft 10 years ago.

"Back in '96-'97, me and a group of people, many of whom are here at Google, helped build stuff that these days is called AJAX," Bosworth said. "We sat down and took a hard look at what was going to happen with the Internet, and we concluded, in the face of unyielding opposition and animosity from virtually every senior person at Microsoft, that the thick client was on its way out and it was going to be replaced by browser-based apps.

"Saying this at Microsoft back in '96 was roughly equivalent to throwing matches around in an oil refinery," he said. "But we concluded we should go and build this thing. And we put all this stuff together so people could build thin-client applications."

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

The Multi-Core Dilemma

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:34:09 +0000

There's a very interesting blog on the Intel site about The Multi-Core Dilemma by Patrick Leonard.

The Multi-Core Dilemma is:

a large percentage of mission-critical enterprise applications will not “automagically” run faster on multi-core servers. In fact, many will actually run slower.

The explores the solutions to this problem.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Khanderao on Service Data Objects

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:34:01 +0000

Khanderao has published an interesting blog entry on Service Data Objects.

Khanderao works for Oracle so it's good to see what someone inside that organization is thinking about Service Data Objects.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software.

seeMore Review in InfoWorld

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 18:52:50 +0000

InfoWorld editior Rick Grehan has written a very good review of seeMore Technologies' Virtual Database product. It is a shame he was too early to see the news that seeMore has added Service Data Object support. Grehan did a good job of reviewing the product would have interesting to see what he had to say about the SDO support.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

BPM and SOA

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 10:10:49 +0000

ZapThink has written an interesting article about BPM and SOA that focuses on the rather stricking disconnect between the activities of BPM and SOA experts. This is well worth considering in the context of the new Service Component Architecture and Service Data Object specifications, which are SOA speciifcations but would certainly benefit from input from BPM experts such as the BPM Group.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Khanderao on Service Component Architecture

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:23:20 +0000

Khanderao, an architect at Oracle Corporation, has written a blog entry on Service Component Architecture.

It is good to see that Oracle are now moving forward on SCA and SDO. The specifications need to support of all the major vendors so that end user organizations have a range of vendors and products from which to choose.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

David Sprott of CBDi on SOA and AJAX

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 16:25:47 +0000

David Sprott has provided some interesting analysis of John Crupi's article on "AJAX + SOA: The Next Killer App".

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Intel's 80 Core Processor

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:04:24 +0000

The BBC has published an article on a new 80 core processor that Intel has just prototyped.

The article points out that application developers are in no way prepared to write applications that take advantage of multi-core processors.

The challenge is to find a way to program the many cores simultaneously.

Current desktop machines have up to four separate cores, while the Cell processor inside the PlayStation 3 has eight (seven of them useable). Each core is effectively a programmable chip in its own right.

But to take advantage of the extra processing power, programmers need to gives instructions to each core that work in parallel with one another.

There are already specialist chips with multiple cores - such as those used in router hardware and graphics cards - but Dr Mark Bull, at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, said multi-core chips were forcing a sea-change in the programming of desktop applications.

"It's not too difficult to find two or four independent things you can do concurrently, finding 80 or more things is more difficult, especially for desktop applications.

"It is going to require quite a revolution in software programming.

"Massive parallelism has been the preserve of the minority - a few people doing high-performance scientific computing.

What is interesting about this is that not only are most application developers not prepared for concurrent programming, they are not really aware of the issue and there is almost no discussion in industry forums on the subject.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Robert Cooper on Open Source

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 14:16:30 +0000

Robert Cooper has connected the dots on two different different facts: there are 139,834 projects on SourceForge and new advanced search facilities - like Koders and Google Code Search - make all of them accessible.

Tthe general perception was that the vast majority of open source projects were dead ends that served no particular purpose. But that's no longer true. All coders need to do is write good comments and the code can now be found and reused.

This means that open source projects can benefit from the Network Effect. The more diverse projects and the more code, the more useful the repository becomes.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

Drug Testing News

David Chappell's Original Thinking on SCA

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:23:45 +0000

David Chappell has written a highly orignal article on Service Component Architecture (SCA).

The biggest challenge enterprise Java developers face is the complexity of their platform. There are too many APIs, each with too many options. Providing a simpler and more unified foundation for creating business logic would have real merit. And this is exactly what SCA's new programming model does.

David Chappell speculates why there is not too much attention to this aspect of SCA (and SDO).

The reason for this might be political, as promoting a replacement for key parts of Java EE 5 is bound to be contentious. It might also stem from people's natural enthusiasm for new technology, such as SCA's assembly mechanism, over a simplification of things that are already available.

What is true for SCA and is also true for Service Data Objects. There are far too many Java data persistence technologies and APIs and the SDO API offers a single, simple replacement for all of them.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

SCA and SDO Articles

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 13:33:23 +0000

In the space of two days, Java Developers Journal has published two articles (here and here ) on Service Component Architecture and Service Data Objects.

The first article, called Real SOA, has a good description of Service Data Objects:

It is important not to forget the complexity introduced by handling data in such a heterogeneous network of services. A technology called Service Data Objects (SDO) addresses this problem. SDO offers a format-neutral API that provides a uniform way to access data, regardless of how it is physically stored. By using SDO, the solution developer will not pollute a business application with code to handle diverse choices of data access, such as JDBC Result Sets, JCA records, DOM, JAXB, and EJB entities.

SDO supports a disconnected style of data access and can record a summary based on any changes made to data objects. SDO's ability to maintain a summary of the changes made allows data transfers to include only the portion of data that has changed, therefore improving environments where bandwidth is a constraint. The change summary information can be used to resolve data access conflicts and concurrency issues.

SDO supplies a powerful yet simple programming model for data with first class support for XML and the ability to automatically persist data via the use of a Data Access Service (DAS). A DAS allows the data to be stored or retrieved from a relational database or another repository, and helps to link the SDO models to enterprise data storage.

The second article, called What is SCA?, has a good one line explanation of Service Component Architecture:

Service Component Architecture provides a concise and flexible model for describing and developing SOA applications and addresses the strategic requirements demanded by agile IT environments. The SCA programming model focuses on describing components and the way that they're assembled together. It's inclusive of existing technologies with a primary goal of operating well as an addition to existing heterogeneous environments.

It's interesting that the initial 'how to' and 'what is' articles are now starting to appear more regularly in technical journals. This is probably because the specifications are moving from planning phase to the real world implementation phase.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software