Why we chose Esper

Esper, is an open source CEP implementation, developed by EsperTech. Prior to building an SOA infrastructure that would utilize the true power of CEP systems in an SOA environment, we did a great deal of research into existing products. We identified two streams of possible candidates,

1. Commercial
2. Open Source

When talking about Open Source CEP systems, Esper and Nesper are two popular projects that outrun many others by both capability and portability. The portability of Esper was a major concern since the CEP system itself will be worthless if it can't easily be ported into an SOA environment. Our decision to use the Apache Synapse ESB was another reason to what made us consider Esper the most likely candidate for the CEP system that we are going to use in our project.

Paul Fremantle, who's one of the mentors of this project has done some initial research on connecting Synapse and Esper which was perhaps one of the major reasons behind our choice.

AXIOM support
AXIOM or Axis Object Model is an object oriented mechanism of handling XML which is proven to be much faster than the traditional marshelling of textual data. Esper's support for AXIOM and especially capabilities in processing AXIOM based events is another fact that makes Esper one of the very likely candidates to work in an environment driven by the Apache Axis2 architecture.

Java APIs
Esper's Java APIs have been well tailored making portability very easy and least complicated. This makes it easier for us to use it in our venture of creating an SOA infrastructure which exposes a CEP system.

Popularity
Our decison to go ahead with an Open Source project was another reason to why we chose Esper, since it is perhaps the most popular Open Source CEP system which is available as of today. Popularity introduces many plus points as our target audience will be more familiar with Esper and it's API compared to another Open Source CEP implementation.

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.

Introducing SCI-Flex

Welcome all.

The project SCI-Flex is an attempt to combine the power of a Complex Event Processing system with a Service Oriented Architecture of another. Our attempt is focused mainly in making the CEP experience truly parallel and distributed.

We have already started with some initial research into combining Apache Synapse and Espertech Esper, and the project is located in Google Code at [1]. We also do have a mailing list which is focused towards pre-development discussions. Feel free to join the effort at [2].

As of present the development team includes,

1. Paul Fremantle
2. Harsha Halgaswatte
3. Senaka Fernando
4. Madhumal Gunetileke

The project is as of present just started, and we are hoping to achieve completion in January 2008.

Instructions for downloading source code is found at [1], however, the location should read as, http://sci-flex.googlecode.com/svn/ instead of http://sci-flex.googlecode.com/svn/trunk.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/sci-flex
[2] sci-flex-dev AT googlegroups DOT com

Regards,
Senaka