'Open SOA' launched -- no surprise, no Microsoft

Call it deja vu all over again. Ten years ago, Microsoft wanted nothing to do with a vendor alliance formed to promote Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition. Instead, Microsoft followed the beat of its own .NET drummer. Now it looks like they'll have nothing to do with the Open SOA initiative that was just announced the other week, either -- an alliance involving the same players as J2EE.

In a report in Application Development Trends, Steve Swoyer observes that Big Red's absence from the OSOA announcement is noticeable. Other heavyweights, such as  BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Tibco, Progress, and Software AG, have signed on to the advocacy group, which is spearheading two proposed SOA specifications—Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO)—and make the specs available to others in the industry on a “royalty free” licensing basis.  SCA and SDO promise to provide a language-independent programming model for SOA.

Steve cites a Gartner analysis of OSOA, noting that “The biggest gap in the specifications—lack of interoperation with Microsoft's .NET—has not yet been addressed, although many vendors plan to support Microsoft technology. Addressing .NET is vital to the effort's success, as almost all organizations will have to integrate .NET applications in their SOA."

SCA is not exclusively about Java, but Steve notes that Open SOA's programming model will initially rely on Web services, the Java Messaging Service, and the J2EE Connector Architecture. Is there still too much Java here for Microsoft to swallow?