John Trigg
Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:46:44 -0500
The GartnerCEP show in Orlando last week demonstrated a number of interesting things about CEP platforms
1. The story of core CEP is commonacross all vendors
2. Aside from the nature of how CEP isexpressed within a platform, true differentiation starts to emerge in toolingand user constituencies that are using CEP
3. Future state as described by DrLuckham indicates that CEP logic becomes available inside reusablelibraries/repositories that can be folded into applications.
The premiseof Apama has always been that you must embrace the full spectrum of users- encompassing IT, business analyst, end user,and senior management, to gain true productivity and applicationacceleration with CEP development. Perhaps that is true for anyapplication development platform. But this has been a core tenet of theApama platform since day 1 when the idea of having a platform thatincorporates both a core event language aimed at programmers, as wellas a metaphor for expressing & implementing event logic for thenon-programmer who owns the core IP of the process. Being able to expressthis information graphically - thus making it accessible andunderstandable, and then take action, completes the user stack we aimfor with our Apama platform.
We haveblogged about this before here and here, but what got my interest this time isthe pitching of pure CEP programming approaches that aresupposedly open to the core business user. To construct a complete CEPapplication within a comprehensive platform you should be able to exercise theskills and knowledge of different users in a collaborative environment.Iterative and componentized development of interfaces, business logic,presentation and action come from the minds of many and in CEP all 4 elements arecore to rapid, real time execution and adaptiveness.
The pointthat Dr Luckham makes about the accessibility and reuse of CEP components inCEP application construction as a future state is one which can be realizednow. The use of Smartblocks within Apama allows for the encapsulation ofreusable logic that can subsequently be incorporated in other CEPprocessing. For instance, logic to represent common trading algorithms orknown air traffic congestion patterns or network intrusion patterns or supplychain metrics or internally developed analytic - all can be expressedas a CEP pattern. Creating any of these as an Apama Smartblock,organizing them into meaningful catalogs for analysts to interrogate and selectfrom, speeds application development and eliminates replication of core CEPlogic within a larger implementation.
Themainstream adoption of CEP won't be based solely on it being cool technology(it is, but then again so was this). Being able to accelerate and redefine application construction in a real timeworld will further its adoption. And maybe so will a solid and wellthought out set of standards. But that is for another time ...
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