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What strikes me most about this development is the companies backing the process: BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, Sybase, IONA and Interface21. The first two of which, firmly stood ground declaring SOA is an approach that does not require special middleware, something that brewed when the JBI debate : To SOA or not to SOA came up. ( JBI is another specification pushed by Sun Microsystems designed around the fuzzy middleware term ESB ("Enterprise Service Bus"), that another set of companies is pushing as necessary to enable SOA).

IBM and BEA seem to have been working on this for some time, since they have already published a series of SCA specifications related to Java, C++ and other core issues around SCA, they even have a "Building your first application" tutorial.

Digging through this last document -- written for those with Java experience -- you will find a series of code listings using SCA XML descriptors, Java 5 type annotations, WSDL files, among other things. But just as you get to the deployment phase of your first SCA component, you find the rather obvious statement : SCA modules...get deployed in SCA Systems (i.e the SCA run-time).

As you can imagine, so much for designing a SOA with SCA without yet another piece of middleware. What is the SCA run-time ? Its not clear yet, but don't bet on using your Java/J2EE, .NET environment or ESB for deploying SCA components -- without an upgrade at least.

However, it does seem SCA - Service Component Architecture is set to shake things up even more in the already crowded "this will build your SOA" landscape, more than anything else, because of the muscle BEA, IBM and Oracle posses in the enterprise software market.