Services are positioned to coexist and collaborate with building blocks that bridge the gap between the business and the IT domains. Service Composite Architecture (SCA) composites are becoming commonplace as simple services that are combined and orchestrated into more sophisticated composite services, designed to ensure business agility and flexibility and to guarantee high elasticity, scalability, and availability.

SCA is becoming the next-generation runtime container. Composite applications built on Oracle Fusion Middleware rely on SCA as the technical umbrella. BPMN-based business processes, BPEL-based integration processes, business rules, and data mappings all reside in the common playground of SCA composites.

This notion of container was the key benefit that EJBs brought into the Java world. It allowed abstracting away complex transactional and exception handling logic and providing a convenient frame in which to develop heterogeneous types of...