Microsoft’s entry into complex event processing, their StreamInsight or MSSI product (a SDK for continuous queries), is likely to provide lots of opportunities for the .NET developer community to try out event stream processing. So far as one can tell, this has not had a huge effect on the existing CEP vendors focussing on query processing. This lack of effect was also true when Microsoft bundled a rule engine into .NET, which had little effect on the Business Rule Engine market. Probably MSSI will simply educate the .NET community, some of whom will use it, while others will move on to explore more mature or capable solutions.
One interesting follow-up question is: will the Java community, now under the direction of Oracle, follow suit and add some stream processing capability? Will some add-on for J2SE deal with some Java notion of events, EDA and CEP?
Probably not. Most of the business world has moved on from the notion of 3GL programming, and instead business analysts tend to specify model solutions using UML or BPMN etc. In other words, they have moved on to a model-driven view of the world. Of course, the Java and C# worlds continue on, with developers working hard on areas that BPM (or design-by-pictures) cannot handle (for various reasons). So I won’t rule out a JSR-933 Continuous Query API, but I suspect an ANSI committee would rather standardise some continuous query extension to SQL first…
Notes: possibly interesting exiting JSR s include:
- JSR-159 (withdrawn) – a Process Component (JPC) API for matching event to process, which probably died because it had to layer ontop of the J2EE stuff (hence making it an extension to non-event-centric heavyweight API).
- JSR-190 – an Event Tracking API for J2ME – potentially quite interesting for use in non-mobile environments too.
- JSR-158 – a Java Stream Assembly API for media stream multiplexing.
