A Short Dissertation on EDA

There is a lot of literature on EDA, event stream processing, CEP, etc; that is, on event and event processing technologies. Although all of them are very good, it can get a little overwhelming. Following, I attempt to describe EDA and how EDA relates to other technologies, such as SOA, real-time, and Java, in a pragmatic form.

Event-driven architecture is an architectural style composed of decoupled applications that interact by exchanging events. These applications are called event-driven applications. Event-driven applications may play the role of an emitter of events, and of a responder or processor of events.

Event-driven architecture is important, because the real-world is event-driven. One example is the financial world, in which trader applications react to events (or changes) made to the financial exchange market. Event-driven situations should be modeled by event-driven architecture.

Event driven applications are sense-and-respond applications, that is, applications that react to and process events.

Events are state changes that are meaningful to an observer. Generally, events are in the form of a protocol message. Events may be simple or complex. Simple events contain no meaningful member events. Complex events contain meaningful member events, which are significant on their own. An example of a simple event is a stock bid event, and a stock offer event; an example of a complex event is a stock trade event, which includes both a bid event and an offer event.

Events may be delivered through different mediums, two of which are channels and streams. Channels are non-active virtual pipes, that is, a producer component is responsible for inserting data into one side of the pipe and another consumer component is responsible for removing the data at the other side of the pipe. The data is stored in the channel as long as it is not removed by a component. Of course, channels may be bound, in which case it may stop accepting new data or purging existing data as it sees fit. Examples of channels are JMS queues and topics. In the contrary, streams are active virtual pipes, that is, they support a continuous flow of data. If a producer component does not directly listen to the stream, it is likely to miss some data. Because streams do not need to store data, streams are able to support a high-volume of streaming data flowing through them. An example of a stream is the of the air TV broadcast.

Having received events, the next task of an event-driven application is to process the
events. Event Processing is defined as a computation stage that consumes and optionally generates events. Currently, as specified by Roy Schulte, there are four ways to categorize event processing:

• Event passing:
  Events are simply handled off between components, there is
  mostly no processing, and it generally deals only with simple events. Event-passing applications are asynchronous, staged, and trigged by the arrival of one event from a single event stream or channel. Sometimes they are referenced as message-driven or document-driven applications. Examples are simple pub-sub applications.

• Event mediation (or brokering):
  Events are filtered, routed (e.g. content-based), and transformed (e.g. enriched). Event mediators are stateless, and deal with both simple and complex events; however they do not synthesize new complex events of their own, that is, event mediators cannot combine (i.e. aggregate) simple events into complex events, mostly due to the fact that they do not keep state. Generally, there is a single event stream or channel fan-in, and multiple event
  streams or channels fan-out. Examples are integration brokers.

• Complex Event Processing (CEP):
  Events are processed by matching for complex patterns, and for complex relationships, such as causality, timing, correlation and aggregation. CEP applications are state-full; simple and complex events are received from several event streams and new complex events may be synthesized. CEP applications must be able to handle a very high volume of events, and hence generally only using streams.

• Non-linear Complex BPM:
  Event-based business processes modeling non-linear complex work flows. The business process is able to handle unpredictable situations, including complex patterns, and complex event relations.

Event Stream Processing (ESP) is event processing solely on streams, as opposed to channels. Hence, CEP is always part of ESP; however ESP includes other event processing types, such as event passing and event mediation, when those are performed on streams, rather than on channels.

An event-driven application may play the roles of event source, event sink, or both. An event source generates events to event sinks. Note that event sources do not necessarily create the event, nor events sinks are necessarily the consumer of events. Furthermore, event sources and event sinks are completely decoupled from each other:

• An event source does not pass control to event sinks, which is the case of service consumers delegating work to providers; and
• Event sinks do not provide services to event sources, which is the case of consumers that initiate and consume work from providers; and
• One can add and remove event sources and sinks as needed without impacting other event sources and sinks.

How does EDA compare to SOA? That depends on how the loosely term SOA is defined. If SOA is defined as an architecture that promotes re-use of modular, distributed components, then EDA is a type of SOA. If SOA is defined as an architecture where modules provide services to consumer modules, then EDA is not SOA.

The concepts previously described are based upon work from Roy Schulte, Mani Chandy, David Luckham, and others.

Next, let’s focus on real-time concepts.

Real-time is the capability of a system on being able to ensure the timely and predictable execution of code. In another words, if a developer specifies that an object must be executed in the next 100 milliseconds (or in the next 100 minutes for that matter), a real-time infrastructure will guarantee the execution of this object within this temporal constraint.

Event-driven architectures are suitable for real-time. Event-driven applications are generally implemented using asynchronous mechanisms; this lack of synchronicity improves resource usage, which in turn helps guarantee real-time quality of service.

Objects that have temporal constraints are named schedulable objects. The system measures how well the temporal constraints are being met by means of a particular metric, for example, the number of missed deadlines. Schedulers order the execution of schedulable objects attempting to maximize these metrics. Schedulers make use of different algorithms or policies to do this, one of which is the Rate Monotonic Analyze (RMA). RMA relies on thread priority as a scheduling parameter and determines that the highest priority should be associated to the shortest tasks.

Let’s re-consider CEP. CEP allows one to specify temporal constraints in the processing of events. For example, one can specify to match for an event that happens within 100 milliseconds of another event. Hence, CEP rules (e.g. queries) are essentially a type of schedulable object, and therefore a CEP agent must be a real-time agent.

In a very loosely form, CEP can be further characterized by two functions, a guarding function, and an action function. The former determines whether an event should trigger a response, and the latter specifies the responses to be taken if the guard is satisfied.

Consider a system that supports CEP agents whose action functions are coded in Java. This implies that the system must support the development, and deployment of Java applications, and hence, in this regards, it must be to some extent a Java application server, or rather as we have concluded previously, a real-time Java application server.

To be more exact, CEP Java action functions do not need the full services of a complete application server, for instance, part of the transactional, persistence, and security container services may not be needed. What is needed is a minimal-featured application server. This minimalist aspect is also applicable to the real-time capability. We do not need a full set of real-time features that enables the development of any type of applications, but rather a minimal set of real-time features that enables the support of CEP agents.

A system that supports CEP also supports other event processing types, such as event passing and event mediation. Therefore, a light-weight real-time Java application server that is able to host CEP agents is a good overall solution for achieving EDA.

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