A decade ago, software ISVs needed to provide compatibility with the application deployment engines of the day – namely the Websphere and Weblogic app servers, which grew quickly in importance after the appearance of the J2EE standard. One wonders if the time is right for event-based application providers to exploit and build upon the event-processing platforms from the main infrastructure players like TIBCO?
Let’s look at the components an ISV’s CEP application requires to run on a CEP platform like TIBCO BusinessEvents …
1. Event channel and destination / address information, and payload: this is for input/output event objects, typically handled asynchronously.
2. Event store: this may be local to the ISV application, shared with some larger application, or both.
3. Event processing agent(s): this needs to be compiled against the BusinessEvents libraries and defined, as a minimum, as a Java application that is invoked from a BusinessEvents agent. If desired or required, rule, state and query resources (defined in BusinessEvents) can be used. Distributed agents for scalability and performance (and resilience) need to be considered too, although these are design-time issues and the distribution/resilience is handled by the platform itself.
So what application areas make sense to exploit CEP platforms? Examples might be:
- Machine Learning: apply advanced algorithms to event clouds to determine new complex event types
- Vertical-market Event Processing: provide custom channels and processing components for domain-specific event feeds
- Optimization technologies: constraint logic programming and so forth
- Standardized Value Chain processes: basic event-driven process building blocks
For any other suggestions, add a comment below. To get started, check out and contact us via the TIBCO Partners pages…
