Tim Bass
07-25-2008 11:38 AM
I am often asked pointed questions (mostly from the stream processing crowd) like, ” What product does CEP?”* Sometime it seems my answer determines the fate of that relationship, as my feet are grilled over the CEP-fire to be beat of jungle drums!* The amount of money I have lost in deals that did not go through because I refused to sprinkle holy water on a vendor’s product and call it “CEP” is staggering, quite frankly.

CEP describes an architecture, just like SOA describes an architecture and just like EDA describes an architecture.

For example, you do not buy an SOA. * An SOA describes an architectural style of programming via components that are involved as services in a distributed network architecture - a service-oriented, or service-based architecture.

The concept of CEP does not have “the A-word” like SOA and EDA, but none-the-less, CEP describes an architecture, not a product.** Do not make the mistake of thinking in terms of “buying CEP”, just like you do not buy an SOA or an EDA.* You think, plan and design in terms of CEP, just like you should do in an SOA or EDA.* These are constructs, not products.

In other words, for “true CEP” you need a number of components, some of the components might be in the architectural style of SOA, others might be in the architectural style of EDA.** Your solution architecture for solving a complex event processing problem might have request-reply transactions, or it might have fire-and-forget messages.* You might have a Neural Networking component for analytics and a rules component for filtering, mediation and scheduling.* You might even have a stream processing component performing as a high performance filter and pattern matcher on streaming data where the output is forwarded to a Bayesian Classifer for further processing.

My key message in this post is that CEP requires a number of technologies to solve complex distributed computing problems.** Do not be fooled into thinking that a single product is “CEP” no more than a single product is SOA or EDA.



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