SCA and JBI Mean Nothing for SOA?

Posted on: June 6, 2007 | Posted in: SCA, SOA

There is an interesting and somewhat controversial interview with ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg where he claims that SCA and JBI are just going to “muddy the waters” as opposed to provide real help to SOA architects.

I certainly agree with his assessment that SCA (can’t really speak about JBI) is more of a generic component-centric programming model than a SOA implementation framework. I blogged about it before. However, I do think that SCA is going to provide a lot of value in the area of application architecture and just general component reuse. A technology or a framework does not have to be about SOA to be useful.

3 thoughts on “SCA and JBI Mean Nothing for SOA?”

  1. I have only worked with JBI, not SCA, but I feel that the technology is worthwhile. That being said, it does create a higher barrier to entry. If you take a look at the ServiceMix forums, you will find a lot of developers struggle with service units and service assemblies. Each unit/assembly is its own artifact which requires it’s own build script/dependent libraries/etc. It is very similar to the whole ejb-ear-war paradigm. I find this paradigm to be very powerful, but it’s one of the big reasons J(2)EE is rarely leveraged in it’s full capacity…if only one guy on the team knows how it all works, the technology is not likely to become popular. For this reason, I would like to see JBI simplified…perhaps using annotations.

    I think XFire was a step in the right direction for the SOA community. I hope that more products take the “simple” is best approach. When it comes down to it, I think most people just want to make their data/processes available to a community of users; the easier they can do this in a secure standards compliant fashion, the quicker things will catch on. Anyhow, just my .02.

  2. Analysts wouldn’t have jobs if they weren’t controversial. What is really entertaining about what Bloomberg said in the article, is that he didn’t even provide a solution to his own dilemma – so what exactly *is* the way to build out SOA then, Jason? I really, really dislike people who shoot down ideas and technologies with no solution in mind. The trouble with ZapThink is that the analysts there like to disparage companies and technologies that haven’t made them money.

Comments are closed.