Comments on: Notes on CEP application development

By: Marco Seiriö

Marco Seiriö — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:40:24 +0000

I see that only 10%-20% of leads that I talk to have performance requirements that we in the CEP world would think of as “high performance”. Most of these problems can also be split on multiple independent servers, leaving only a few % which actually need monster performance on a single server or a cluster of servers.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:31:47 +0000

Paul,

I’ll admit to knowing much less about TIBCO’s CEP than other CEO offering. That’s because nobody at the company seems too concerned about changing this state of affairs.

CAM

By: Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:11:02 +0000

Actually, you can argue that CEP tools exploit all 3 of “data manipulation” (a.k.a. continuous query) languages, visual event-oriented programming, and rules (whether Rete-based, inferencing, or whatever).

As Charles said, TIBCO’s BusinessEvents CEP tool utilizes Rete for rules (Rete = a pattern matching algorithm, hence its applicability to general CEP should be obvious regardless of its usage in “conventional” rule engines). But TIBCO also does the continuous query thing, and uses drag n drop state models as a type of “visual event oriented programming”. Other vendors’ ESP and CEP tools also provide combinations of these 3 mechanisms (although possibly not yet Rete, unless you add Drools 5 to the mix).

The main philosophical aspect with “CEP” programming is the desire to process events as they occur, for whatever event patterns they impact. Truly “event driven” rather than “store and process in silos”…

Cheers

By: Ujin

Ujin — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:00:29 +0000

Thanks for good article! I think that most of products, I mean tools for speeding up programming, have no tools for visual constructing a model of application.

By: Charles Young

Charles Young — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:55:27 +0000

The use of Rete engines for complex event processing is a contraversial topic. Tibco’s engine is built on Rete. SAP Research has published a couple of papers on the subject in the last year or two, and the topic has been rattling around the academic community for several years now. My own view is that Rete engines are a useful tool in the CEP developer’s armoury, but are better suited to the upper reaches of an event processing network, close to the analytics and automated business processes, rather than close to ‘raw’ event observation.

Microsoft’s use of their monadic LINQ technology makes huge sense on the MS platform where LINQ has already found very broad acceptance and is well-supported by ’syntactic sugar’ in C#, F# and VB.NET. There may be support for managed C++ as well. LINQ allows MS to support CEP development in a natural fashion directly within mainstream GPLs rather than having to provide specialised DSLs and without having to modify those GPLs in any way.