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New Service Component Architecture for Java Lowers Development Costs with Improved Agility and Flexibility
FOREST HILL MD – 13 October 2008 – Apache Tuscany , a new Top-Level Project of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), today announced the release of version 1.3.2 of its Service Component Architecture (SCA) for Java – the Project's latest release since its graduation from the ASF Incubator four months ago.
Apache Tuscany provides a robust, highly extensible infrastructure for building, deploying, running and managing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, streamlining the development process of service-based application networks and addressing real business problems posed in SOA. Service Oriented Architecture solutions utilize new and existing services to create brand new applications that may consist of different technologies.
"Over the past two years, the Tuscany community has focused on developing fully open, standards-based, large-scale SOA solutions," said Anthony Elder, ASF Vice President and Chair of the Apache Tuscany Project Management Committee. "We continue to receive enthusiastic support for Tuscany's simple, highly extensible Service Component Architecture (SCA), Service Data Objects (SDO), and Data Access Service (DAS) subprojects. Becoming an ASF Top-Level Project and great ideas for future development – including improvements in application server integration, distributed runtimes and Web 2.0 support – underscore how Tuscany continues to go from strength to strength."
"We are very pleased that Tuscany has graduated to a top-level Apache project. Tuscany offers a great open source implementation of the SCA specifications and it demonstrates the value of the Service Component Architecture specifications in making it easier to build applications which integrate functionality using an SOA approach to services," said OASIS Technical Committee Co-chairs Dave Booz (SCA Policy and SCA-J), and Mike Edwards (SCA Assembly).
Service Component Architecture (SCA) Support Across Protocols and Technologies
Service Component Architecture defines a simple, service-based model for the construction, assembly and deployment of a network of services (both existing and new ones) that are defined in a language-neutral way. SCA can be used with a wide variety of existing middleware technologies, enabling existing assets to be leveraged.
"IBM Software Group is using the Apache Tuscany project to deliver a Java implementation of SCA 1.0 to its WebSphere Application Server customers," said Erik P. Kristiansen, Websphere Product Manager of IBM Software Group. "Delivered as an optional product extension, the WebSphere Application Server version 7 Feature Pack for SCA is currently available in Beta (at http://www.ibm.com/websphere/was/sca)."
The Apache Tuscany SCA programming model provides a level of abstraction that separates the concerns of developing business solutions from infrastructure and technology details. This lowers development costs, making it easier to evolve SOA solutions in response to new business requirements.
Apache Tuscany supports many different binding protocols and programming technologies and works with a variety of container models. Its modular architecture makes it easy to integrate with other technologies and runs on Apache's Tomcat, and Geronimo projects, as well as other application servers.
"Using Tuscany helps our leading banking customers to fulfill the SOA architecture and business component specification," said Chris Cheng, Vice President of Primeton Technologies Ltd. "Primeton has done a consulting service for one of China's leading financial services company, to help them to fulfill the SOA architecture, business component specifications and the container implementation. Now the enterprise architecture, business component specifications and container implementation have been approved to be used in all the Enterprise-wide applications in the future."
In addition, Apache Tuscany implements the SCA Version 1.0 specifications as defined by the Open Service Oriented Architecture Collaboration. Apache Tuscany also supports the specifications being standardized by OASIS Open CSA and provides additional support for OSGI, scripting languages, and Web2.0 related technologies such as RSS and DWR.
"The work of the Tuscany project has made valuable contributions to the evolution of the SCA specifications, through surfacing specification bugs and requesting clarifications in a number of areas. Tuscany's achievements give us confidence that SCA is of wide applicability and can be implemented by a range of runtimes," added Booz and Edwards. "As well as implementations of the current SCA specifications, it is interesting to see the community that has developed around Tuscany pioneering a series of component implementation and binding extensions to SCA, particularly in the area of Web 2.0 capabilities, such as HTTP and REST bindings - including ATOMPub and JSON wire data formats - and the innovative implementation.widget type."
Those interested in learning more about Apache Tuscany and SCA are invited to attend ApacheCon US, the official conference of the Apache Software Foundation, taking place 3-7 November 2008 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Register online at http://www.us.apachecon.com/
To download Apache Tuscany SCA v1.3.2, access mailing list archives and documentation, or to get involved with the Project, visit http://tuscany.apache.org/.
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