Glossary

Here are some of the terms used in this blog, mainly for posts tagged with “eventprocessing”.

Many years ago, professor David Luckham wrote a book called The Power of Events where he described the need for and some best practices and technology to allow organizations to make use of the massive amounts of real-time data streaming around their networks. In this book (and related papers), he coined the term CEP or Complex Event Processing.

Years later, a group of products has sprung up, aimed at soft real-time processing of network data (bus messages, market data, monitoring events, etc.) These products each use different strategies and provide different features toward this goal. They are a step above a simple real-time message processing framework like ACE for C++ or the connection of a RETE engine to a message bus. They call themselves CEP. They have also gathered some industry buzz for their ability to dramatically simplify projects involving soft real-time requirements.

The word “complex” in Complex Event Processing has been hotly debated by people claiming that certain vendors should not morally be able to call themselves “CEP”. While I think that classifying is a good goal, I have strongly disagreed with all the attempts to date at classifying some products as CEP and others as not-CEP. The definition always seems to be arbitrary and based on someone’s current favorite technology.

I prefer the term EP or “event processing” because the word complex is so contentious.

The official site for CEP is complexevents.com and there is a somewhat confusing glossary of terms posted here. On that site, you can also find links to most or all of the major vendors that consider themselves CEP. There is a group dedicated to advancing the state of the art in EP, called the EPTS.

Marco maintains not only a good CEP blog but also a good list of CEP vendors at the ruleCore blog.

There is also a small article on CEP on Wikipedia.

There is one mature, open source project claiming to provide CEP, called Esper.