Service Component Architecture or SCA as it is more commonly referred can be described more or less as an offshoot of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). SCA is comparatively a new step taken by the front row players of the software world like Oracle, Sybase and IBM with the claim that it is more appropriate for delivery of functions supporting the SOA.
Among the advantages of a SCA designed functions, the primary ones are language compatibility ranging from C++, JAVA, COBOL and PHP to those like XML, BPEL and XSLT. Moreover, in SCA, data can be signified as SDO or Service Data Objects. Another added advantage of SCA is the capacity to work flawlessly with different constructs such as One Way, Call Return, Notification and also the adaptability for composite functions.
However the significance of SCA has been trimmed down quite a bit for a considerable section of users due to the lack of support by Microsoft Corporation. Also, there is a constant problem about adoption as the specification does not deal with the running of the SOA applications. Moreover, instead of interoperability, the attention of SCA is more towards portability making it prone once again to the drawbacks of CORBA. Howbeit, there is a method termed as Activation which is said to help SCA in giving support in interoperability.