CEP is a marketing device. So what does that say about CEP products?
Following up on the recent post on Seth Grimes blog about how vendors of “Complex Event Processing” do not really care about the term CEP – they use it just as a brand to attract your attention, there is no usable underlying “theory of CEP” that all these vendors are following.
So what does this say about CEP products? Not much.
Most vendors of “CEP” products are selling a tool that that provides a language and run-time that can be used to code and run applications which process data in real-time. Maybe that data is messages from an ESB, stock ticks, web clicks – whatever. And each vendor has a different approach. Each tool is different, so each tool might be great for one kind of problem and terrible for another.
If you ever believed in the need for software to ease the development of soft real-time applications – well then that need would be there whether or not it’s called CEP. And if you never believed in the need for this kind of thing, then you should never have been interested in CEP products to begin with.
Bottom line: if these vendors can fill a fundamental software need (and IMO some of them do), then they will sell software and make money. If you have a need for soft real-time processing, go see if CEP vendors have some software that you’d like to buy. Don’t ever buy anything just because of a technology acronym, CEP included.
The fact that there are different implementations with variety, no agreed upon basic theory etc — is a normal phenomenon for first generation of new computing paradigms. See the state of the database area after its first generation — long time ago — and as I believe that event processing is a real discipline and it is going to become a major area in the computing industry, our task is to work on the basic theory as well as engineering, language, modeling and usability aspects and accelerate the process of maturity.
cheers,
Opher
Understood and agreed. My goal was to try and focus conversations on the future and on progress, rather than on who is following the pure vision of CEP – because such a thing has not been formed yet.