Sunday, November 8, 2009

On the Event Processing book by Chandy and Schulte



Today I got a package of books from Amazon that included two new event processing related books. I'll review the first of them today. This is the book by Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte, called "event processing - designing IT systems for agile companies". The title itself (agile companies) indicates that the book is business related, and indeed it is primarily answers the questions: why use event processing, and how it is related to other concepts in enterprise architecture concepts. The book is non-technical and fits the level of managers/CIOs/ business analysts. The book starts with overview and business context of event processing, talks about business patterns of event processing (another type of patterns, besides all other types of event processing patterns), talks about costs and benefits of event-processing applications, and types of event processing applications. After doing the ROI part, it goes to more architectural discussion -- getting top-down approach: EDA, events, and employing the architecture. Next there are two chapters about positioning event processing against the rest of the universe: SOA, BPM, BAM, BI, rule engines (I'll write about this positioning attempts in later postings). Towards the end there is a chapter of advices how to handle event processing applications (and this chapter reads like analysts report). Last chapter talks about the future of event processing, again from business perspective, future applications, barriers and dangers (again a topic for which I should dedicate a complete discussion), and drivers for adoption.

In conclusion: good book to everybody who wants to know what event processing is and what is its business value. Things that I thought such a book might also include --- some reference to what currently exists in the industry, how the state-of-the-practice relates to these theoretical concepts presented in the book, when COTS event processing should be used vs. hard-coded, which are practical considerations of event processing applications
(maybe in the second edition?)

For those who asked me what is the relationships between the book Peter Niblett and myself are writing and this book, the answer is that our book has a totally different focus, explaining step-by-step, what is needed to build an event processing technology, providing the reader an opportunity to experience the various approaches in the state-of-the-practice by providing a free downloadable versions of various products and open source. The target population is also different - we aim for designers, architects, developers and CS students, while The book by Mani and Roy is aimed at managers, business analysts and MBA students. The review of the second related book - later.

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