SCA provides developers with a simple, business-oriented, model for creating systems based on a service oriented architecture. It manages infrastructure complexities such as transactions, security and reliable messaging and frees the developer to focus on providing business function. The solutions developed using SCA can be changed declaratively to alter infrastructure capabilities or application configuration properties to meet changing business requirements. For example, infrastructure capabilities such as security policies may change from one environment to another and can be changed without the need for re-implementation. Application configuration may also be changed in this way, for example, the currency quoted by a stock quote feed may be changed though the SCA configuration mechanism.

SCA divides up the steps in building a service-oriented application into two major parts:

* The Implementation of components which provide services and consume other services. SCA supports service implementations written using any one of many programming languages, both including conventional object-oriented and procedural languages such as Javatm, PHP, C ++. XML-centric languages such as BPEL and XSLT, and also declarative languages such as SQL and XQuery. SCA also supports a range of programming styles, including asynchronous and message-oriented styles, in addition to the synchronous call-and-return style.

* The Assembly of sets of components to build composite business applications that addresses specific business requirements. This is performed by wiring together the service implementation components.

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