On messages and events

The smiling face belongs to Gregor Hohpe who is known as the co-author of the enterprise information patterns book. Gregor has conducted a BoF session in the EuroPLoP conference that I have written about in my previous Blog. The original book that Gregor has written has been about messaging oriented middleware, and now he is trying in his spare time to write the second volume - in the BoF he presented one chapter of the book talking about - identifying that something has gone wrong and handling it. This, by itself, is an interesting topic that I've been involved in the past on some related stuff, but as the title indicates the title of today's Blog is about messages and events. Hans Glide has recently dealt in his Blog in the issue of event processing vs. message processing, and part of the DEBS 2008 conference has been dedicated to messaging related research. Thus, this is a good timing to write a few lines about event and message processing --- being back home from all these travels.

Message is a transport mechanism, and as such message processing deals with the delivery of messages, relation to communication protocols, handling "not delivered messages etc..., one of the branches of messaging is also handling subscriptions when the protocol is pub/sub. The evolution of pub/sub has some similarity to that of event processing - started with subscriptions to every message published on a channel, moving to content-based subscription, which seem to be the focus of much work in the pub/sub research community. Content based subscription follows actually the ECA paradigm, where each message is treated as an event, thus, we see influence from the event world on the messaging world.

So - is event processing just fancy name to message processing ? -- not really, message processing is a lower level implementation that can serve also as infrastructure to event processing. An event can be represented by message, but not every message represents event. An event denotes something that happens, while I can send an old picture as a message and it is not an event at all. Thus the difference is in the level of architecture. Having said that, there are some interesting intersections: much of the simple and mediated event processing are shared with message processing (and indeed some of the patterns I am using to describe it are taken from Gregor's book).

The simple and mediated event processing are not new -- they indeed exist 15-20 years, and issue part of the functionality of event processing. The "detected patterns on history of multiple events" is the newer part in event processing, and it seems that it also a step in the evolution of pub/sub thinking.

Note that the pub/sub community calls itself "distributed event-based systems", and I indeed believe that they are part of the event processing community...