Drools Fusion: OSS competitor to BusinessEvents
Until now, TIBCO BusinessEvents has been the only rules based product focussed on event processing. A rules based product makes quite a lot of sense in this area: most people find rules to be a familiar and easy to understand way to code some common kinds of event logic (“when such-and-so happens, and so-and-so condition already exists, then do XYZ”). Enter Drools Fusion from the JBoss project. While the initial release will clearly not be up ot the feature set of BE, it’s got promise. Combined with Esper, this would make a very interesting event processing platform.
I see this kind of thing as helpful to TIBCO and other CEP vendors. It provides a free demo of event processing capabilities to the masses. Then the vendors can step in with capabilities that the free software currently can’t match and pick up some sales.
Hi Hans – actually we are already seeing OSS-experimentation-followedby-commercial-project pattern – so kudos too to the DROOLS team.
Cheers
Please excuse my ignorance, but as someone new to CEP, I thought that Esper and Drools Fusion were competing products which did (much) the same thing, so what would the purpose or benefit of using the two together as you suggest in your article?
They both take in events and process them; that is about where the similarity ends.
Both the syntax for writing the processing logic and the engines that execute the logic are rather different. As neither product has all the strengths of the other, each product has advantages for certain use cases. And some common use cases benefit from both products used together.