On the event processing languages experience

I have realized that I have not written in this Blog for over a week, this is neither because I am away, nor because I am dry of topics to write about, but in the last few weeks I spend many hours a day in wrapping up a proposal for creating a project or the European Union program, by a consortium of 16 partners, beside IBM Haifa Research Lab (the organization that pays my salary) the consortium includes SAP Research, Software AG, Thales, Siemens, Nokia Siemens Networks, TXT, CITT and various universities all over Europe, total of 16 partners from 9 countries. I'll write about the proposal itself after we'll submit it. Alas - It turns out that preparing such a proposal is a very time-consuming task, especially if one is the project coordinator, so I reduced anything else in life for a minimum, and working longer days than my usually long days. Luckily, there is a deadline next Monday, after which I'll be able to return to normal life. Doing collaborative research among many partners from different countries, and different types of organizations is very interesting game.

I also started to teach the event processing course in the Technion yesterday. I am using the EPIA book draft as teaching material. The students assignment for this course will be quite interesting. Since we have made the EPIA book language-neutral, and use our own meta-language to define all parts of the application, we also wish to provide the reader with the opportunity to experience with event processing programming that actually runs, we have asked around, and got agreement of six language owners (four commercial products and two open source) to participate in this game. All of them agreed to implement the FFD (Fast Flower Delivery) which is the example that accompanies the EPIA book (see below a slide


The students will be divided to teams, each team will study a language, using the fast flower delivery, and in the process, help stabilize the various implementations for the readers, and play with them. They'll also get a mission to do some extensions of this example on their own, to experience the language also in an active way. This may be an interesting experience in understanding of the various languages that are out there. Will be quite interesting. This is also the first time I am teaching according to the upcoming book. Stay tuned to reports about this experience. More - Later.