I have written about standards before a few months ago, and nothing seems to have happened since that time. As I was asked to talk in the OMG meeting in March about the role of standards in EP, I'll have to devise a more detailed view - but I still think that standards is one of the key issues we should invest in. In my opinion the most important standard is the language standard, the EPL - which should standard as a meta-language. There is an intention to start working on it later this year. Other areas - interoperability, modeling, various standards for event structure (header, payload). The importance of standards stem from various perspectives.- The customer's perspective -- the main competitor of EP COTS is hard-coding the functionality within a regular programming, and making EP as a non-issue. One of the claims of enterprises is that their developers know how to program in standard languages, and they will not invest in teaching them proprietary languages. While not everybody take this approach, the industry does not like proprietary. There is an effort to make Stream SQL language - but since it does not cover the entire market (even not most of it) - this is not enough.
- The ability to draw incremental knowledge -- as an example, work in the academia on query optimization around SQL has helped the entire industry. Concentrating around a single language can serve as a focus and have the knowledge be incremental instead of disiributed.
- When moving to the "platform" oriented EP, instead of the "engine" oriented of the first generation, a platform will be able to include various implementations - agents that are based on various technologies/engines... thus, various technologies need to inter-operate, but also be part of the same application, and we don't want the application be built in a mix of languages...
more -later.
1 comment:
EP language standards... a thorny subject given various vendors approach to CEP - especially language. I sense a language war brewing. I believe customers take two views of standards:
1. Irrelevant. They see no value in standards but are solely focused on leveraging the best technology to meet the needs of their business. If one waits for standards to develop and mature, the benefits of new, bleeding edge technology will be lost.
2. A safeguard. By adopting standardized technology customers feel they are safeguarding themselves against vendor lock-in. In some respects this is true. Adopting Java as a development language clearly falls into this camp. However, using the java class interface of some vendor's product (be that CEP or other) negates the safeguarding benefit.
Just a few thoughts...
Louie Lovas
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