Service Oriented Architecture or SOA is system of describing computational infrastructure powered through the use of business processes packaged as Services. SOA has become a means of interconnecting applications through IT networks.

SOA encourages distributed systems & modular programming and therefore has become popular in many ways. Among the broader benefits of SOA are,

• Component level distinction
• Ability to integrate larger systems
• Legacy System Integration
• Language Independent implementations

Complex Event Processing or CEP is a derivative of classical event processing, where multiple events from an event cloud are examined in view of identifying meaningful events based on pre-defined detail. CEP is based around several operations on events such as complex pattern matching, event correlation, abstraction, hierarchical organization, causality, membership, timing etc.

Examples of events include church bells ringing, the appearance of a man in a tuxedo with a woman in a flowing white gown, and rice flying through the air. A complex event is what one infers from the simple events: a wedding is happening. CEP is a technique that helps discover complex, inferred events by analyzing and correlating other events: the bells, the man and woman in wedding attire and the rice flying through the air. CEP is useful in Business Intelligence, Business Activity Monitoring, Business Process Management, and other fields such as National Security, Banking, and Airline Scheduling etc.

Event Stream Processing, or ESP, is a set of event related technologies of which CEP is a subset. Thus, ESP essentially involves CEP. Therefore, this project will partially address the requirements of ESP as well in a SOA environment.

 

Our project focuses on integrating CEP with SOA, a reasonably new concept that has attained broader popularity in early 2008. Most SOA enthusiasts are looking forward to the merging of these two concepts by the end of 2008, and we too are becoming a part of that. The main idea is to build an SOA infrastructure around the CEP system. Our project is a part of a larger system where as the others involve various optimizations and improvements to existing CEP engines. However, these projects will not be interdependent and will probably not require inter-operability, which has been left for later, giving more freedom to R & D.

What we'll be doing is the construction of distinct components so that a potential user could utilize our framework to use a CEP system within an SOA environment. This would give them enough flexibility to utilize various components that we build in order to achieve their broader goals.

The whole idea of CEP in a SOA environment will somewhat be an inversion of a traditional database query over through an application. In a database the queries are executed on top of data, but in a CEP running over SOA, data will be flushed on top of a query. The result at the end, however, will be similar under the given constraints.

This system will be capable of monitoring and observing a complicated SOA infrastructure, which most WS systems aren't capable of. It also has an added advantage for a system to go even a step ahead and even provide the query along with the data making the process even more dynamic.

 

What Is New In This Project

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The concept of CEP over SOA is a really new field in the world of N-Tier Architectures. In addition to that, the integration of CEP, to various other aspects of IT such as business activities etc. will also be a novel experience. We'll also be extending the present Apache Synapse ESB to better support Esper as a part of this project, and also improvements to interactions with Esper that will perhaps benefit a broad audience of users of Esper.

The gains to the SOA industry will also be immense, as this concept will connect SOA to fields such as BI, BAM, and BPM which will further popularize and strengthen SOA against other upcoming technologies. SOA and CEP research will invariable help other protocols such as semantic web, atom, and other dialects in that stream.