On restful event producers

Another year has passed and yesterday was my birthday; I tend not to celebrate an event that reminds me that I am getting older, so I found on the Web a greeting card that fits my sentiments; however -- this year I got much more birthday greetings than usual. Of course I can be encouraged that all of a sudden I became popular, but the truth is that I filled profile descriptions in some social networks - Facebook, LinkedIn, the family tree site (may be one or two more) - all of them send alerts to people about birthdays...

I have written about event producers such as the CICS event producer, that instruments CICS transactions and emits them as events; event producer needs to produce the event by sensing or instrumenting some software/process to create the event, and also needs to communicate the event to the event targets (event processing agents, channels and consumers).

There is a new article on IBM developerWorks dealing with emitting events using REST interface. The word REST has an association with resting, like the Van Gogh famous picture of noon rest - below.

But in this context REST of course means "representational state transfer". The article describe how to use the REST interface of Websphere Business Events to emit events from any application that has access to web protocols. Enjoy!

On high availability in event processing applications

In the EPIA book (now due to be available in late July), we have a discussion about non-functional requirements of event processing applications. There is a variety of such requirements, and different applications require different set of requirements. One of the common requirements we seen nowadays is high availability. Recently an article describing building high availability in Websphere Business Events using IBM middleware was published in IBM developerWorks. This article was written by Chris Ahrendt, who has been until recently working in IBM software services, and currently and currently defines himself in LinkedIn as "Independent at consultant". Chris was one of the first IBM solution architects exposed to the event processing technologies early on, when we did proof of concepts with Amit, and was member of the evaluation committee we have done for the IBM Software Group Architecture Board, that was one of the milestones in the decision to get into this area. Chris' article briefly explains the concept of high availability and describe the specific solution. Enjoy!

On Impact 2008

This is the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, the place that hosts this week the IMPACT 2008, a very big customer conference of IBM Websphere (more than 6000 persons).

The hotel is huge, the logistics is very good, and the program is very diversified. James Taylor described the two first days in his Blog . One of the main themes in this conference was the issue of business event processing, IBM's product Websphere Business Events, was announced last week. Today I have given a talk on the concept of "business event processing" together with my colleague Steve Lyons (a former Aptsoft guy), thus I have done my share. This was well covered by the press. The main message behind it is enabling the business user to control the behavior (e.g. define patterns) of EP applications, this concept won a lot of interest from the IBM clients that were present.

On another matter - congratulation to Mark Palmer for his new position in Streambase, Mark is definitly one of the notable figrue in the EP area.