BEA microService Architecture (mSA)

When I saw the announcement of the future SOA 360 product initiative from BEA I focused on the Workspace 360 idea, which sounds nice (I think the SOA killer application will be something allowing Excel-capable users to compose applications and services). But I overlooked the microService Architecture (mSA). And it looks very interesting, too.

For start, it seems to be a SOA not based on a central ESB, as popular in software vendors and as it was now with BEA. It looks more like Jini, but based in OSGi. It is a federation of containers of small services, which discover and communicate between them dynamically. It seems to follow the view of SOA as a galaxy of free services, instead of having them orbiting around a central broker. They talk about "infrastructure services" providing composite service capabilities, but this does not look like a central ESB anyway.

The services are Java or bound with Java, but I guess they will be able to interoperate with others at least by WS-* . mSA seems mostly protocol-agnostic, so it should support both WS-* and other (I do not see the point of being more abstract than WS-*, but OK, many people does).

I am curious to see which will be the method to discover services, and how will they handle the actual communication. We'll see.