An alliance of leading software vendors Wednesday announced progress on specifications to define a language-neutral programming model for application development within SOA (service-oriented architecture) environments.

SOA, a way to create and manage IT systems through reusable software and services, is proving increasingly popular among corporations. As more companies look to deploy Web services, their developers are calling for increased standardization to make the process of integrating different third-party SOA technologies less onerous.

Some-time rivals BEA Systems Inc., IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG first got together in November to begin work on the common programming model along with IONA Technologies PLC, Sybase Inc., Xcalia SA and Zend Technologies Ltd.

"We want to give customers an easier way to build composable applications," Karla Norsworthy, vice president, software standards at IBM, said during a Wednesday conference call.Under the banner of Open SOA collaboration, the vendors have concentrated their efforts on two projects -- service component architecture (SCA) and service data objects (SDO).SCA focuses on defining models for creating and assembling service components for building SOAs, while SDO aims to provide a consistent method for data handling within SOA applications

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Prashanth Rai