Nice to see a paper on IBM Developworks on some of the theory of “event processing”, authored (amongst others) by the Chair of the Event Processing Technical Society, IBM Labs’ Opher Etzion, and fellow EPTS Reference Architecture team member Catherine Moxey. The paper is of course somewhat of a “broad brush” view of event processing, as indeed you might expect from a team representing such a diverse range of event-handling software as Tivoli, CICS, MQ and so forth from the broad (and, from a TIBCO perspective at least, heavyweight 😉 ) IBM software stack.
Some thoughts:
- The paper implies a need to model, in any significantly large event processing system, the types and roles of the event processing agents and how they interact. Some such agents will be tightly coupled (such as co-operative rulesets in a TIBCO BusinessEvents inference agent), whereas others will have more identifiable interfaces and roles (such as separate inference and query agents in a distributed TIBCO BusinessEvents application). Tables 6 and 7 for example are almost metamodel definitions for an event processing agent.
- Possibly a better name for the paper would be “A Conceptual Model for Event Processing Networks“, given the emphasis on event pathways through processing agents.
- IBM Developerworks (like this blog) has an unattributable “scoring mechanism”, and shows today that one reader was unimpressed enough to profer a low score – but why? I also can’t explain why this is described as aimed at an “intermediate” audience, as the principles seem basic and well explained…
