IBM, Oracle Standardizing Web Services

Sometimes a great joke never dies. Just substitute "Web" for "Unix" in the following canonical one-liner and you'll see what I mean: "The nice thing about Unix standards is that there are so many to choose from." Components, data, and protocols, oh my. It's too much for developers to bear. With the rise of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) as the foundation for building and deploying applications, a bewildering array of choices for developers can be streamlined with the creation of standards for services. A press release listed the high-tech firepower being brought to bear on the issue of developing web service standards: Oracle, IBM, BEA, SAP, Zend, Iona, Siebel, Xcalia, and Sybase. Once developed, the standards specification will help bring structure to the various applications constructed upon the SOA and its series of reusable services. The standards will be called the SOA Programming Model. Two components called SCA and SDO were devised by several of the collaborators listed, and help in developing applications built on reusable services and in getting to data across disparate databases. Service Component Architecture (dubbed SCA, with what we hope will be apologies to the