SCI-Flex introduced in webinar By Paul

SCI-Flex was featured on "Complex Event Processing with Esper and WSO2 ESB" - Webinar by Paul Fremantle which was held on 29th July 2008. Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder and CTO of WSO2, spoke about Complex Event processing capabilities of the WSO2 ESB, in the fourth and final part of the webinar series on the WSO2 ESB. WSO2 ESB is a enterprise grade lightweight ESB based on the popular Apache Synapse ESB, and is presently at version 1.7.

Paul discussed about how the WSO2 ESB can easily be configured to listen and monitor various events flowing through the WSO2 ESB using the Esper open source complex event processing system, and identify patterns and useful events. As a mechanism of integrating Esper into the WSO2 ESB, Paul introduced SCI-Flex which is project focused on maximizing the use of Complex Event Processing in the field of Service Oriented Architecture through a flexible integration.

The SCI-Flex team is now working on further improving the Synapse-Esper mediator which serves as the primary medium for connecting Synapse and Esper which can infact be used with the WSO2 ESB as well. We are very much thankful to Paul for mentioning about SCI-Flex in his discussion. More information on the webinar and subject matter can be found here.

SCI-Flex Milestone 1 Plan

The SCI-Flex team is at present working on the 1st milestone of SCI-Flex due in early September 2008. The development of SCI-Flex was broken down in to several parts so that basic functionality will be made available from early stages of development. It was decided that we would primarily focus on the development of the Synapse-Esper mediator at the beginning and focus on other aspects afterwards.

The requirements for the 1st Milestone as agreed by our team can be expressed as,

1. Make it possible for Synapse to talk to Esper. All messages that go through Synapse will be routed to Esper during this stage of our research. By achieving this, we need not worry about what messages would go to the CEP and what wouldn't.
2. Attach registry support to our SOA+CEP infrastructure. We will be making it possible for someone to store a CEP query, EQL/EPL in a back-end registry, which will then be fetched by Synapse by default and then applied upon the event stream that will be flushed through the CEP. We will not worry about how we will be fetching various queries, or fetching a particular query on demand for this milestone.
3. Make it possible for someone to specify a Endpoint Reference (EPR) along with the query, so that Synapse will redirect the response obtained through the CEP to the specified EPR. The EPR will also be made available through the registry.

The development activities related to Milestone 1, is carried on the SCI-Flex M1 branch. We'll be merging it to the trunk once we've finished work, most probably in early September.

CEP Enhances SOA's Eventing Capabilities

Eventing in a SOA environment is crucial for enterprise applications. According to the WS-Eventing specification, web services are capable of monitoring and notifying status and also performing a defined operation when a certain event is triggered. However, like any other specification that explains web based extensions to event driven architectures, this lacks the true power of making decisions on events based on a stream of events itself.

The combination of CEP and SOA unleashes the true potential of a complete event driven architecture implemented over a web based or any similar network communication protocol based architecture that is supported by existing SOA networks. Thus, one could describe CEP over SOA as a universal replacement to existing Publisher-Subscriber systems such as,

1. JMS Topics
2. XMPP
3. WS-Eventing
4. Atom Pub/Sub

Decisions made through CEP systems involve identifying meaningful events from a number of events, extracting the product of a reaction between several events, understanding event patterns etc. The possibilities in handling bulky event sources are immense. Thus, the positive addition to an SOA environment through a CEP system is limitless.

It is clearly understood that CEP enhances SOA's eventing capabilities. In addition to these marginal gains, a complete CEP installation over an SOA network makes you more productive. We are looking forward to introduce such other benefits.