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An interview with Guy Churchward, vice president and general manager of WebLogic Products at BEA Systems
First, what is event-driven SOA?
Event-driven SOA, or EDSOA, combines SOA's request-response and Event-Driven Architecture's (EDA's) event publish-subscribe paradigms. Supporting events as services within SOA allows designers to map the application design to the business problem, which typically consists of both events and requests/responses. Combining service and event processing results in extreme agility. However, today's Java-based offerings have been unable to support the need for companies to conduct "business at light speed"—until now.
Why does EDSOA matter?
EDSOA supports rapid and informed responses. These have always been critical in some cases: the military commander who must respond to an incoming missile attack, the nuclear power plant operator who must prevent a cooling system breakdown. But these days, even fairly ordinary business processes require quick and effective responses: the financial trader wanting to seize an arbitrage opportunity in an overseas market, the factory manager wanting to cancel a production run if there are high customer returns at retailers.
How does EDSOA support faster responses?
Modern business processes generate such high-volume streams of diverse events that identifying a noteworthy event is akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Extending SOA so solutions can identify noteworthy events within these data streams at light speed is the goal of EDSOA. It leverages experience from specialized real-time systems with data stream management and complex event processing—and makes this power accessible as part of typical business application development. Users and systems get an up-to-the-microsecond picture of situations that affect their business and know instantly when something happens that requires special attention.
Without an EDSOA approach, operations systems and personnel might be able to quickly project the consequences of a few unforeseen events. But often, there are too many interactions among the different variables—nobody could keep track of it all. EDSOA helps organizations build systems that detect such opportunities or crises before they become critical, so enterprises have the greatest number of response options.
What's the role of SOA in EDSOA?
SOA provides the integration framework to bring together data from multiple systems. And, when an organization is ready to respond to a challenge, SOA can help by providing integration with systems that can implement a basic response or invoking a business process orchestration engine that can coordinate a sophisticated response.
And what does EDA add?
EDA tremendously improves the business’ ability to respond to different, seemingly uncorrelated events that are bombarding it constantly. By providing the ability to instantaneously filter, aggregate, and correlate events, EDA detects at light speed events and patterns that may pose significant opportunities or threats to the business and provides businesses the ability to react to these instantly. The payoff is huge. With comprehensive data feeds and proven event definitions in place, an organization can react with much greater speed and skill to the challenges that arise.
Can I use Java middleware as my starting point?
Yes, and no. The middleware would require special enhancements. It requires special event-optimized runtimes that deliver guaranteed pause times and the ability to handle hundreds of thousands of events per second, to apply tens of thousands of rules, and to respond in microseconds. It also needs advanced services for dynamic, data-driven event definition. Finally, an organization would also need tools, frameworks, and components purpose-built for building, deploying, and monitoring event-driven applications.
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