Preface

What brought the five of us together to write a book on Apache Tuscany and Service Component Architecture (SCA)? We all had practical experience of how difficult and costly integration of applications and technologies can be, and we were excited about how Tuscany and SCA can help solve these problems. Having been involved with Tuscany and the SCA specifications from the early days, we understood the potential of this new technology and wanted to share it with you.

Although we’d been entertaining the idea of writing a book for a while, the event that made it possible was the completion of the SCA 1.0 implementation in Tuscany. With that we had a real implementation of a service-oriented infrastructure that we could use to explain SCA through examples. As well as implementing the SCA 1.0 specifications, Tuscany handles integration with many underlying technologies and enables users to focus on developing business solutions instead of worrying about infrastructure details. By writing this book we wanted to help our readers take advantage of the power of SCA and leverage the many technology choices that Tuscany offers.

Of course, we didn’t see a point in repeating what the SCA specifications already provide. The specifications define SCA but don’t explain how to use it. Rather, we chose to address how to use SCA with Tuscany by showing working examples and sharing best practices. There are articles available that give a high-level overview of Tuscany and SCA, and there’s some detailed technical information on the Tuscany website, which assumes a good understanding of the technology. What’s been missing until now is a hands-on introduction and guide that explains the capabilities of Tuscany and SCA and shows by practical examples why these are useful to application developers. This book provides that “missing link.”

We hope that by reading this book you come to share our enthusiasm for SCA as a rich programming model that makes it easy to create flexible service-based applications, and that you discover how Tuscany’s wide range of technology support can help you overcome the challenges posed in integrating service-based applications.