In reporting out the April 15 special report on "SOA Tools and Infrastructure," I was told that SCA -- the Service Component Architecture -- is the ultimate consolidation of SOA. It presumes a completely services-oriented world.

Michael Rowley, CTO at software visualization and business process management company Active Endpoints, said the SCA specifications are going through the standardization process and "the most important ones should be finished by the end of April." The specifications are with OASIS, which is working on version 1.1. Version 1.0, Rowley said, was made by a large group of companies who "just declared it was ready. All the vendors involved in 1.0 see the value in the formal standardization process."

The idea, he said, is to take SOA to the next stage -- how you organize your entire IT organizations around services based on standardized protocols. "No one has gone the next step of giving developers new technology to build services-based applications," he said. SCA calls for assembling networks of composite services, and supports multiple languages, such as BPEL, Java, C and C++, he said.

The alternative to all this for code reuse in the enterprise, he said, is Java EE, which has many more specifications that are longer and complex. Yet even with the uncertainty surrounding the Oracle-owned Java Community Process, which advances Java EE, "the technical arguments are more likely to sway people than political ones." The problem with Java EE, Rowley said, is the tight coupling that exists in distributed environments. "When you need the same Java classes on both sides of the wire, you've got this big network with so many cross-dependencies and couplings that it's very difficult to manage."

In short, he added, "Nobody today is saying, 'Turn all your code into EJBs to get reuse.' "