EDA on a personal level...

EDL an interesting acronym. Event Driven Life. That is what I live. From putting email reminders on my calendar for meetings, bill payments, soccer games, to emergency events like my wife calling me "Were you supposed to pick up the kids?" And me giving the standard ACK, "Oh s***, I forgot..."

Once I realized where I got, I had to ask myself, how did I get there? No, not having kids, I mean the event driven life. Then I realized, because I needed it, because it makes my life simpler. It too complex now, without using some level of event processing.

What happens if you don't have the event notifications? You have to have the discipline to poll your calendar at relevant times. When you wake up, before going out, checkin' in with your spouse... You have to actively go out and ask for information. Ask anyone, especially my wife, I tend to forget about things... (Including updating this blog)

So, I figure, when do you need EDA in an enterprise? As soon as polling becomes too complex to support, EDA can be the job saver. EDA is more costly, computing wise, than direct call. Always was, always will be. But EDA will provide for "Just In Time Computing" Processing resources are used only when needed.

Now, when does EDA breaks down? Well, if my wife were to call me every 5 minutes to remind me of things, I know I would break down. Too many events, something we call event flooding can break down an EDA system if flood gates are not in place, like turning a phone off... (a throttling system can be used to slow down the influx or an event filtering system to reduce the number of events).

So, should you go EDA? Only if it makes sense. Only if systemic complexity is too high, if one system being offline stops all other from processing. EDA is more complex than direct call systems, but there are tools to help. IEP is one of them. IEP can take an influx of events, and preprocess it for filtering, redirection, any types of event processing you need, that is not too business logic intensive. (It can't reject an account opening application for example).

So, how should you get started with IEP? Well, this blog is a good place, there is also the IEP site on java.net and the iep wiki on wikis.sun.com. At the moment, processing event as events is still new to most of us, but it will catch on. It has to, life has become too complex for us not to use it. Gotta stop this blog now, an event notification just got in, time for soccer practice for my son....

Later!

Posted at 03:00PM Jul 14, 2008 by sergeblais in OpenESB  |  Comments[0]