Sunday, May 12, 2002
Architects and developers will gain a wealth of knowledge from a new book titled The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems. The short description is: adds a structure, formal approach to system and business events. This book applies structured engineering methods to systems and software engineering, making it a unique and much needed addition to the body of knowledge. Prior to this book event processing was in the domain of embedded and realtime systems developers and hardware designers. This book shows how to effectively use these techniques in IT.
The first two chapters give reasons why complex event processing (CEP)is essential to the distributed systems that characterize supply chain, e-commerce and internet-enabled applications. They also sort out the key issues and present a paradigm for a global event cloud that is decomposed in subsequent chapters. Instead of providing an in-depth analysis of each chapter, which would make for a lengthly and boring review I'll give the highlights of what I liked:
- Architecture is an important theme throughout the book. In particular the Rapide architecture description language adds formality and structure. The key elements of Rapide are causal event modeling, event patterns/pattern matching and event pattern maps and constraints.
- Events, timing and causality, and their interrelationships, are thoroughly explained. These are the key to understanding the treatment of patterns, rules and constraints that follow, and for tackling the subsequent discussion of complex events and event hierarchies. This is slow reading, but the essence of the book.
- Event processing networks, which are a practical use of the knowledge imparted by this book. Moreover, the two case studies showed real world application of the concepts instead of abstract theory. They reinforced all of the key points made earlier in the book.
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