Chapter 1. Introducing Tuscany and SCA

Businesses are always looking for ways to lower the cost of creating and maintaining business applications. One popular approach to business application development, often called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), is to adopt a model where business functions are described as well-defined services that can be used to compose working applications.

SOA is an attractive idea, but putting it into practice can be difficult. Business computing environments typically contain many different technologies, and the integration of these technologies can be complex. In a single application you can be joining Java objects, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes, browser-based clients, and Ruby scripts using web services, as well as Java Message Service (JMS) and JSON-RPC protocols, to name but a few.

What’s needed is a common way to describe an assembly of distributed services regardless of the technology used to implement and connect them. Step forward the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and the Apache Tuscany project.

1.1. The big picture

1.2. Designing a sample composite application

1.3. Implementing a composite application

1.4. Working with other SOA technologies

1.5. Summary