Component meets service: what does the mongrel look like?

Abstract

Computing with services has attracted much attention as a promising approach for developing distributed applications. The approach is often advertised as being superior to distributed component-based software engineering (CBSE), because it provides a higher potential to bridge heterogeneous IT application and infrastructure landscapes. It facilitates cross-institutional cooperation, lets services run over all kinds of ubiquitous communication infrastructure, scales better and simplifies legacy software integration. If this were absolutely true, there would be no reason for a consortium of major vendors of service and Java EE technology to come up with a new specification, called service component architecture (SCA). This emerging standard tries to leverage service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles with component-based software development techniques. In this article we discuss some commonalities and fundamental differences of the CBS and SOA worlds. We illustrate SCA briefly using snippets of an ongoing case study based on an e-university federation. Then we elaborate on the qualities and current deficits of SCA in the light of CBSE findings and related works.