Open Standards


In many industries, companies adhere to standards that allow for greater prosperity than would be possible if each company followed its own proprietary rules. Standards in housing construction, for example, ensure that manufacturers of pipes can benefit from economies of scale in pursuit of a larger market than would be available in the absence of industry-wide standards.

The primary benefit of SOA standards is that they make services interoperable, which means that services can communicate with one another, even if each implementation is written in a different computer language or is accessed by way of a different transport protocol (software that oversees the runtime transmission of data).

Standards also ensure that an SOA runtime product can support Quality of Service features, as described in Chapter 2.

SOA standards are open in the sense that any software manufacturer has the right to use those standards when developing an SOA-related product. In addition, the process of creating and revising the standards is based on a political process that is more or less democratic. Any interested party has the right to participate in all meetings that lead to decisions about a standard.

Each company that works on an open standard seeks a text that matches the company's marketplace strengths. The competition among those companies is one reason for the long delay in making a standard final.

Several major organizations oversee development of open standards for SOA:

  • Open Grid Forum (http://www.ogf.org)

  • Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS; http://www.oasis-open.org)

  • Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I; http://www.ws-i.org)

  • World Wide Web Consortium (W3C; http://www.w3.org)

Later chapters give you practical insight into standards that are in effect or under consideration, and Appendix A describes several others.

Open standards are distinct from open source, which is source code that you can learn from and use in your own projects, with certain legal restrictions. Open-source implementations of Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO), for example, are being developed in the Tuscany incubator project of the Apache Software Foundation. For details and code, see the following Web sites: http://incubator.apache.org/tuscany and http://www.apache.org.




SOA for the Business Developer. Concepts, BPEL, and SCA
SOA for the Business Developer: Concepts, BPEL, and SCA (Business Developers series)
ISBN: 1583470654
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 157
Authors: Ben Margolis

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