Apche Tuscany - Infrastructure for building SOA application - Introduction

Link : http://incubator.apache.org/tuscany

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is basically an evolution of distributed computing. SOA provides a modularity of business logic, which can be presented as service for clients (client as in client-server architecture). These services are loosely coupled in nature. It is an architectural approach driven by the need to overcome the challanges of tightly coupled and department specific applications.

SOA Architecture is trying to solve the problem domain of how to construct and tie to-getaher, or assemble services.

A service is a unit of code that performs some function.

• May be addressed by a client locally or remotely
• Offers a contract

Services may be assembled in hetrogenous enviroment

• May be deployed across different runtimes e.g. J2EE Server, OGSi container, .Net Application Server
• May be written in diferent languages

SOA promises benefits such as

1. Improved business agility
2. Cost Reduction
3. Easy sharing of information in hetrogenous and distributed environments

What is Apache Tuscany ?

A open source project in incubation at Apache that provides infrastucture for building service-oriented applications. Tuscany is based on specifications defined by the Open SOA Collaboration. Tuscany is based on three independent technologies designed to work well to-geather. They are not dependent on one another and can be used independently. But these technologies togeather provide a full infrastructure for developing and running SOA based applications

• Service Component Architecture (SCA) for assembling service networks. It a simple, service-based model for construction, assembly and deployment of network of services (existing and new ones) that is language-neutral.
• Service Data Objects (SDO) for representing and tracking data as it flowsacross a service network. It provides a uniform interface for handling different forms of data, including XML documents, that can exist in a network of services and provides the mechanism for tracking changes
• Data Access Service (DAS) for declarative data access. It provides a simple SDO interface to relational databases