vincent
09-20-2008 08:30 PM
The last sessions on the last general day for EPTS4 covered… standards! Chris Ferris, who leads IBM’s Standards group, presented a background on why standards are important. His main point was that standards can persist much longer than you intend, using the case of Roman chariots (100BC) leading to rutted roads and standard axles (100-1800AD) and railroad tracks (1850 on) and thence tunnel sizes which determined the maximum size of Shuttle boosters (1970s on) as they travel on the train network.
Girded with high-caffeine Pepsi and Hotel Coffee, the attendees watched a demontration of concensus in the ensuing standards panel, managed by Gartners’ Roy Schulte. TIBCO’s presentation (in the set 7 minutes, more of a projectile vomit of pointers on the topic), covered:
- standards are not vendor inventions, but open vendor collaborations usually within an existing standards body like OASIS, W3C or OMG.
- *Possible standards include messages / middleware (like JMS), Event Processing Elements / pattern languages, Event Processing Agents / deployment APIs, user controls like rule management languages, and visualization types.
- Middleware standards are probably not the domain of EPTS - event delivery is a different domain from event processing.
- Standards don’t just “happen” - they cost time and effort, and need to be specified by customers (who ultimately pay for their development).
- As CEP is not a “complete change” from conventional IT, existing standards and efforts are relevant:
- UML Class and UML State for modeling
- OMG PRR and W3C RIF are nearing completion, and can be easily extended for event-driven rules
- The new OMG EMP for event models is about to hit RFP stage, and is of direct interest to EP vendors
- Ditto the new OMG AMP for agent models, of interest to distributable EP Network vendors
- For Continuous Queries, it is time for the ESP vendors to get their act together and define a baseline. Before someone else does without our input.
- Orchestration diagrams for event processing elements is quite a common feature, yet could be standardised by a version of BPMN (either extending BPMN or doing an EP version).
- Standards bodies are already creating interest in CEP standards: at OMG next week for example, not only is PRR, EMP and AMP being discussed, but also a Business Modeling and Integration discussion on Dynamic Business Process Modeling (covering EP and BPM), and a Business Architecture discussion on the intersection of rules, processes, etc.
To end up, Peter Niblett (IBM) gave an update on WS-Eventing (W3C, Microsoft) and WS-Notification (OASIS, everyone else) and the defunct end of the attempt to join them (WS-EventingNotification). It seems the general opinion is that the WS-* stack has been overloaded, and is not ever going to be associated with EDA. Although IBM supports it, no-one else does, nor will they unless customers think it is useful and demand it.
Source...
09-21-2008
