Friday, July 13, 2007

Esper brings Complex Event Processing (CEP) to mainstream

There has been two interesting posts recently regarding Esper.

One from Tim Bass, from Tibco, reporting from the InformationSecurityAsia2007.
Tim reports in his blog that complex event processing solutions like Esper can be used for extrusion detection (that is inverse of intrusion detection in a network where you want to track malicious users and software acting from inside, zombi machines etc.).
Tim reports Esper is already known from several experts in the field and is beeing considered for such use cases. Glad to hear and thanks Tim for the info.

The second interesting news appears in Intelligent Enterprise where Esper is beeing quoted as the only active open-source project for CEP - both for Java and .Net platforms (what, you never heard about NEsper? Bet you will !).

Esper is quoted separately from the so called more commercial solutions like Apama, StreamBase, Coral8, Tibco etc. Especially because Esper is a great initiative to bring CEP to mainstream thru innovative, affordable and a la carte approach as quoted here:


Not For Big Companies Only.
With the ranks of CEP practitioners including big government, big finance and big telco, you might think the technology is accessible only to giants . That's not the case, however, as there's an active open-source CEP project called Esper that offers both Java and .NET components.


It 's nice to see Esper quoted, although I am not sure I would do such a difference between Esper and the others solutions available for the following reasons:

  • Esper is commercially backed and supported - checkout Esper' founder company EsperTech

  • Esper users include major investment banks already and other big shops - checkout the mailing list if you want to get a taste



Of course I can't say if those guys are evaluating Esper or if they run some of their production system with it already - so you never know who is a user evaluating software and who is ready / has already entered the commercial relationship with commercially backed open source software unless you ask and they dare to reveal it.

There's trully no difference in fact when you look at that from a community point of view.
When you are building open source software (which I have been doing for years now) there is only one thing that matters: the community.
The community rules the use cases and drives the product direction in unanticipated ways accross industries of all kind and size.

This is a typical mistake regularly done when trying to compare open source software and commercial software as two fundamentally different things. Would you start saying Linux is for small companies and Windows for the big ones...

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Event Driven Application Servers - BEA is in

BEA has started to spread the news about the fact they'll enter the Event Driven Application Server area - which I covered during my JavaOne 2007 session (with a bias on the first and only Java and .Net container for event-driven applications aka (N)Esper). The product name is WebLogic Event Server 2.0 (go figure what happened to 1.0!?), slatted for a public beta in the next few days.

Tim from Tibco wraps up the news in his blog.

Stay tuned.

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Esper at JavaOne, on Event Driven Application Server and XTP

I am pleased to be back at this year JavaOne 2007 as a speaker on "Event-Driven Application Servers". I'll showcase ESP/CEP technology to the Java community and industry, San Francisco, on Friday May 11th, 12:10.

The session that I co-lead with Tom, Esper and EsperTech founder, will introduce the audience with Event Driven Architectures (EDA), Event Stream Processing (ESP) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). We will showcase the why, what and how on event-driven application servers, going from simple integration over JEE platforms to tailored off-the-shelf leading edge solutions playing in the eXtreme Transaction Processing (XTP) field.

This has implication in various areas such as investment banking, RFID, monitoring, compliance management and many more (up to this good old SOA...).

If you attend the event or are in the bay area and want to meet up, ping me or leave me a comment!

The session id is TS-1911 and if you happen to attend JavaOne this year you can already add it to your session schedule or click below to connect with me for the event.

Join Me at the 2007 JavaOne Conference Event Connect Tool!

I hope to see you there and see a whole bunch of long time friends there.

Esper
JavaOne 2007

Monday, March 12, 2007

Esper tutorial on OReilly ONJava

(imported from http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/avasseur, read comments there)

It's live!



Event-driven architectures turn a traditional data-driven application's architecture upside-down. Instead of storing the data and running queries against stored data, Esper allows applications to store queries and run the data through.


This article introduces Esper, a lightweight ESP/CEP engine written in Java.


This Esper tutorial is now available online at OReilly ' ONJava. The tutorial illustrates an airport self-service terminal that we monitor and improve with real-time customer relationship management by using both ESP and CEP capabilities of Esper.


It includes a fully functional yet simple to run bundled application and also includes Eclipse configuration files so that you can start practicing right away (if you are an Eclipse user...).


I hope this will help get those blooming ESP/CEP concepts to mainstream. The tutorial should give you enough ground to understand where we come from and enough details to get started in your own project right away.


If the EPL snips below does not sound familiar to you

select avg(price) from StockTick.win:time(30 sec)
where symbol='GOOG'

select type, count(*)
from BaseTerminalEvent.win:time(10 minutes)
group by type
output all every 1 minutes


Read it online at ONJava


or read more about Esper

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Terracotta' Jonas & Eugene on AOP at AOSD 2007

(imported from http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/avasseur, read comments there)

Jonas and Eugene from Terracotta - the Naturally Clustered Java provider and maker of OpenTerracotta - have published a very interesting paper on industry use of AOP and point out some limitations present in current AOP frameworks: "Clustering the Java Virtual Machine using Aspect-Oriented Programming".

Excerpt:
"application startup time with AspectJ load-time weaving [which I partly authored] was ... slower and memory overhead was ... bigger ... when comparing with similar transformations done with either the Terracotta runtime or the AspectWerkz AOP engine [which I authored with my friend and former coworker Jonas]."

This comes to no surprise to me as AspectJ is born for build time weaving and Eclipse integration and AspectWerkz was born for load time and runtime weaving. As author of both (as we joint forces from AspectWerkz to AspectJ back mhh.. 2 years ago) I was unable to get the best of both world in one engine as we initially focussed on features integration - such as thru the @AspectJ style that is annotation-defined and driven AOP. Since that time my open source bandwith has been drawned due to work engagements. That is unfortunate as I believe there are no technical reasons for this multi-weaving-optimized engine to not happen. Fortunately AspectJ is strong on runtime performance which is something you really have to consider as well.

Their paper is available online on AOSD 2007