Book review: The Live Web by Phil Windley

I am browsing through the book "The Live Web" by  Phil Windley, whose sub-title is "Building Event-Based Connections in the Cloud".   Phil sent me the book (with handwritten dedication), and starting from the back cover I liked his motivating examples: "Imagine a world in which your phone automatically mutes the ringer when you start watching a movie" (actually today my mobile phone rang when I was giving a talk, forgot to mute it) or another one  "imagine a workd in which your alarm clock sets itself based on your schedule and other information like weather, traffic, and your past behavior" (I don't need much sleep so getting up early without alarm clock, and some members of my family have the habit to turn of the alarm clock and get back to sleep, but I am sure it is helpful for some people). 
This reminds me of many examples that I used over the years to explain either event processing or autonomic computing (e.g. the refrigerator invited the technician and more).   Phil's answer to realize these scenarios is what he calls "the live web", which according to him is the evolution beyond Web 2.0 which is still static web. I think terms like "the active Internet" or "The event web" was used before in a similar context.  Much of the book deal with projection of event processing to the web interfaces,and working in web environment. Some of it is dedicated to events, their semantics, and operations around them.  He also dedicates chapter to the current hot topics - cloud and mobile and connects them to the story of the live web.   Phil also founded a start-up called Kynetx to implement these ideas, the book also describes their system and language in detail.
Overall - interesting book, both for those who want to understand the principles and those who wish to drill down on the details of how to build such applications (or learn the Kynetx stuff)...   It is also another book that explain the principle of programming with events -- although we somewhat different perspectives of the other books. 

Book review: Managing event information by Gupta and Jain

I am reading the book "Managing event information" by Gupta and Gain,  which is part of the series of short books by Morgan&Claypool synthesis lectures series.   The authors, professors from U.C. San Diego, and U.C. Irvine, have concentrated in the modeling of events, the illustration below was copied from the book to demonstrate the flavor.   The book starts with an introduction and running example about news agency, it also defines the setting of various types of events: spatio-temporal database events, sensor events, multi-media events (video, audio).    Chapter 2 deals with "Event Data Models" starting with temporal database as a tool for event modeling,  such that the temporal database represents the collection of states, while event is any transition in any state (value change), then it moves to discuss conceptual temporal models and discusses E* - a graph based event model using RDF and ontologies.  formalizing E* and showing some example of modeling using E*.  It discusses several modeling constructs such as disjointness (causal or temporal) of events; coverage; ordering' lifespan and spacespan of events, and constraints on graph relationships, such as follows, sub-class etc..  In chapter 3 the book discusses the implementation of the event data model; the illustration below is a UML diagram showing one of the supported patterns - events that participate within a situation, there are other patterns supported such as causality.  Later it discusses storage model of various types of events.  Chapter 4 is entitled "querying events" and discusses the possibility to query a collection of events. Example of queries are: spatiotemporal queries such as: "which meetings are scheduled in this hotel today after a certain talk", which looks like a regular query in spatiotemporal database, the queries can also support aggregates (looking for frequent meetings with a certain characteristics), and hierarchy, expanding to sub-events.   It can also query continuous events, graph relationships etc -- these queries seem to be the same as queries on spatiotemporal and graph databases, except he fact that the database represents events.  Chapter 5 brings a major application of the event model - the creation of a story based on the event model.  The storytelling is of multimedia type, a thread of research that follows Brooks' paper. 
Kevin M. Brooks: Do Story Agents Use Rocking Chairs? The Theory and Implementation of One Model for Computational Narrative. ACM Multimedia 1996: 317-328
The  book is summarized with some applications, conclusion and references.


The E* model is interesting in the sense that it shows various relationships among events,  and enable to get observation on the events and their relations to states.   Since there are no standards in this area, the terminology used in this book is sometimes inconsistent with other publications in this area, but it is generally clear.   The book proposes a holistic approach of event modeling, claiming that current event modeling systems are looking isolated aspects of events and cited the famous metaphor on the blind men that touch an elephant from different points, I have used this metaphor talking about misconceptions about event processing.

It still remains to be seen whether such models will penetrate the real-world systems.  
I'll give as a project topic in my event processing course more investigation of E*.

On Alex Buchmann's 60th birthday book

 Alex Buchmann is an old friend, we first met when both of us were 20 years younger, and worked on active databases.  Alex is a little bit older than me, and recently celebrated his 60th birthday.  I could not travel to the ceremony in Darmstadt, but as a gift, contributed to the book, which includes a collection of papers edited by Alex's students (or ex-students).  Today the mail has brought me a copy of this book, with personal inscription from Alex.  The book is called "From Active Data Management to Event-Based Systems and More".   

More detailed about the book can be obtained in the Springer LNCS site.    The book includes a paper entitled "Spatial perspectives of event processing" co-authored with Nir Zolotorevsky.   Browsing the book I see that I am in a very good company, some of the other authors are: Jean Bacon and Ken Moody, Mani Chandy, Umesh Dayal, Tamer Ozsu,  Gerhard Weikum, and many others. 


When I summarized the year 2009 in this Blog, I have written that the quote of the year is taken from Alex's keynote address in DEBS 2009, stating is using regular database techniques for event-based systems is like trying to drink the water in a waterfall using a straw.    Alex also does not like the term "event processing", claiming that "processing" sounds like "data processing" which is an archaic term, and prefers to talk about event-based systems, as shown in the title of the book.


I wish Alex many more years of  good health, fruitful work and fun.

New review for the EPIA book

It is holiday again, and tomorrow I am leaving for a short (2 days) vacation here in Israel with my family, and then in Sunday night, travelling to the USA for a short (4 days) business trip, where the highlight will be participation in the event processing - capital markets conference of OMG EP CoP;  here is the conference's program. I have been travelling too much recently, hope that after this trip I'll have a break in travelling.


Today I've noticed a new review of the EPIA book posted by Tushar Jain, a person I have not been familiar with so far.   Good to see that people like the book.   The reviewer is right that the conceptual model we described in the book still need to obtain acceptance like UML and BPMN,  well -- the next step is to try and work on standard proposal for event processing modeling language, and I'll take advantage of my coming trip to USA to try and kickoff this activity.
One comment -- I don't see the other books mentioned as competitive.  The book of Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte is a business oriented book, and our book is a technical oriented book, so the intersection is fairly limited, furthermore, we mention in the book that we don't deal thoroughly with the business perspective, and recommend Chandy and Schulte's book as a complimentary for those who would like to get deeper understanding of the business perspective.      Later in October I'll start teaching again a course in the Technion based on the EPIA book (first one since the book is out, though I have used the book's draft for previous course).

The book: Event Processing IN ACTION - is now out

I still need to write something about the vacation in Western Canada, but returning to the office today, I have received a package of copies of the EPIA book, that was just published. The project of writing this book (in my spare time) was quite demanding, and was twice longer than the original expectation. I have talked with some colleagues who wrote books for other publishers recently, and found out that relative to their experience, Manning has exceptional quality control procedures, with three reviews by readers during the book's development, and a multi-stage production process with a lot of iteration between the authors and various people on the production team -- technical proofreader, copy editor, proofreader and the production manager.

The acknowledgements section of the book also lists many people who helped in contributing ideas and review and the Manning team; I am also grateful to David Luckham who agreed to write the Forewords section. Last but not least -- working with a partner on such a project requires the ability to agree on many details, and a lot of interaction, many of them in evenings and weekends. My partner in writing this book, Peter Niblett, has complemented me since he came from a different perspective; Peter's drive for perfection has contributed considerably to the quality of the book, Peter is also a very pleasant person to work with.

I also noticed that Manning added a section explaining who is the person on the front cover (some people asked me).

Manning maintains an Authors forum that enables communicating with the authors, this forum helped us during the book's development process to get feedback, and a lot of the comments have been adopted (with acknowledgement to the appropriate person); this forum is being kept alive.

The book itself is printed in black and white, there is also a colored ebook version, available on the Manning's book webpage. The book also included a use-case that is known as FFD (Fast Flower Delivery), and has already several implementations in different languages, with more expected, this site will be kept as live site and is being hosted by EPTS. Interestingly, the FFD case has been used within the DEBS 2010 event processing architectures tutorial in order to demonstrate the architecture notions.

The book has served as basis for both academic and IBM internal courses, and I'll be able to share teaching material with anybody interested to use the book for that capacity.

Some other follow-up ideas is to provide comprehensive authoring tool for the model described in the book, work on automatic compilation from the book's model into various event processing languages and maybe to general programming languages as well -- these can all be nice students' projects, the model described in this book can also serve as a first iteration on standard in event processing application modeling. We'll see how much of the follow-up will be materialized.

On the production phase of the EPIA book

I have co-edited some "collection of articles" books that are common in the research community, there is certainly some logistics associated with it, but relative to producing a "mass market" book it is a children's game comparing with the production of the EPIA book that I have been writing together with Peter Niblett. The publisher of our EPIA - Manning, has various ways to ensure quality. Manning is a publisher focusing on computing related book, thus it views book development as a software development project (and indeed many of its books are code-driven). While the book was initiated by Manning and not by us, they have sent the outline we sent to bunch of reviewers, all of them people with deep knowledge in event processing. Some of the advices we got were very useful. Since we wrote in the outline that we are going to base the book around a single example, the advice of one of the reviewers was that we'll use an example that everybody can understand, the reviewer added that if we would chose an example from the financial services domain (as many of the EP papers are doing), we might create a communication obstacle with some of the readers, who will not be familiar with the terms. We followed this advise and created the "Fast Flower Delivery" (FFD) that already received multiple implementations in many languages. For each 1/3 of the book, we had a milestone in which they sent the book to a bunch of reviewers (in one of them there was a response from 14 reviewers). The reviewers were mix - some people who have deep knowledge in event processing, and some who don't know what it is, both types of reviewers sent various types of comments, some of them resulted in restructuring of the book (originally we planned 15 chapters and 3 appendices, we ended up with 12 chapters and 2 appendices, but with around 100 pages more than we originally planned)- This was just the development process, and it last for 15 months. A few weeks ago we have started the production phase -- it has a workflow (supported by electronic content management system): Another technical review by a "technical proofreader" - here we looked at PhD student in this area, and thus addressed faculty members active in this area; the person who did this job is Samujjwal Bhandari, a PhD student in Texas tech university, he has read all chapters, made comments and caught various cases of inconsistencies among the different chapters, then it moves to the copy editor who makes editorial modifications, and returned to us with many comments and questions that we had to answer, after doing this round, each chapter is going to the proofreader, who is doing another editorial pass, and then comes back to us with questions and comments, so we are doing another pass on all chapters. After that it goes to the typesetting. In the background there is a graphical work to redo our amateurish figures in a professional way, and then hopefully the book will be ready. Currently we passed the phases of the copy-editing, and now working with the proofreader. There are a lot of editorial rules, and style issues that have to be dealt with (Peter is much better than me in noticing the small details), and in fact -- amount of work is much higher than I anticipated, it consumes much of my free time for over a year now, as we both are doing it in addition to our daily work -- but I hope the result will justify the investment. More about the book - later.

On EPIA Website

The Event Processing In Action book that Peter Niblett and myself are writing is getting to the last phase before getting to production. We have finished a full draft that is now going to through the publisher's review system. The book has a closely related website that is intended to enable the readers to have hands-on experience of the concepts described in the book using representatives of the various programming styles that exist within the state of the practice.

This is done by having a single example implemented in all these languages. Some of these implementations already exist on the website, some have just "placeholders" as reference to a site. Most allow downloading the software, and some using the "software as a service" model in a cloud. Six languages are already referred on the site, more will be added soon for example IBM's Websphere Business Events.

The website is being prepared by a group of students, and is now exposed for public review.

This is a first version, probably much to improve. So comments are appreciated.

This is a link to the website. The website is hosted in the book section if the EPTS website.

More on the EPIA upocming book

I have written before that I am a science fiction fan, and out of the (relative) young generation of the science fiction writer, there are some writers I find as very creative in ideas. One I've written before about was Rob Sawyer, this time I am reading in my spare time Brandon Sanderson's book: Warbreaker. I have read some of the other books of Brandon Sanderson, and this one find this with many creative ideas. All his books are highly recommended if you like this genre. Anyway, I did not write in this Blog last week, actually took a few day off to work on the EPIA book.

We now have all chapters of the book ready in a draft form !!!, several of them are still in cleaning phase, we will send them to another set of reviewers (Manning is champions of reviews, it did a review on the outline, and three reviews during the book), and will hand out the final copy sometimes in January, so the target is to have the book out around the end of April.

The new stuff in the book -- some of it are revisions: adding a section about the relationships of event processing to other stuff, and adding code samples from various products in different chapters, some of it is new, a new chapter about implementation issues: programming styles (based on the DEBS languages tutorial), non functional requirements, performance metrics and optimization kinds. We are also advancing with the book's Website. I'll write more about selected parts of the book later.

On the Fast Flower Delivery example and various programming styles of event processing

As explained in one of the previous postings, we are using a single example in the EPIA book as an example that accompanies the book, this is part of the book's methodology. I'll write more about the methodology more, as we are now writing the preface for this book explaining the methodology (among other things). Actually today I received an additional review of the book from the publisher and the reviewer has criticized the example claiming the since most of the readers are men, example that relates to flower may be considered as too feminine, and realizing that it is too late to change, suggested that we'll select another example in the second edition.

Well, I am thinking what will appeal to the real machos.

Maybe we should go for Poker example -- this is a real macho staff...

On second thought, the real machos are engaged in boxing, so maybe we should have an example around boxing match... go figure...

Getting serious now. The FFD (Fast Flower Delivery) example is explained in the book using our building block approach, it is also demonstrated using several languages. I have approached the entire community earlier this year, and there has been a very good willingness of participating in this game, implementing the FFD example in various languages by the "language owners". We have six languages participating in the game now. Languages implemented by four commercial products:

• Aleri (actually the CCL language originally Coral8)
• Apama (owned by Progress Software)
• Rulecore (a Sweden based company)
• Streambase

and two open sources:

• Esper
• Etalis

The reader will be able to look at the example implemented in these six languages; furthermore, will be able to download a full or demo version of the engine implementing this language. As written before the logistics of constructing this website, validating the solutions etc... are done by students taking my event processing course. Some examples will be brought in-line to the various chapters of the book to provide the readers some glimpse of the different styles.

We should have a "Beta version" of this website within a couple of weeks.

I'll update about this experiment more.

On EPIA and Friday the 13th

Today is Friday the 13th, some people have superstitions about the number 13th in general (many hotels don't have 13th floor, sometimes not even X13 room), and about Friday the 13th in specific. It seems that Manning, the publisher which publishes the EPIA book is having $13 off the list price in the Manning Early Access Program, so today is an opportunity to purchase the book $13 cheaper, get into the book's MEAP site and if you purchase the book, when checking out use the code: fri13 as a promotion code.

This is also a good opportunity to update about the book status. We have received the review reports from the 2nd review (actually 3rd including the reviews on the book proposal). Somehow the reviewers keep changing, which make them somewhat inconsistent with previous reviews. Reviews are good for improving the quality of the manuscript, it is also shows the necessity of writing a forward to the book explaining exactly what is the focus of this book, as various people have in mind various thing, and as I have written in the recent three book reviews on this Blog, books come from different focus, to different audience, so it is important to set the expectations right about what the book is (a in-depth technical book about the concepts behind designing event processing applications) and what it is not: It does not follow a single language, it is generic and demonstrated through multiple languages, a concept that is new for some readers, also it is not book about how EDA fits SOA, BPM, Messaging and other adjacent concepts and does not take a business oriented perspective, we write briefly about these topics (some reviewers think they are vital, other think they are boring), we leave the business oriented discussion to the book of Chandy and Schulte, and we'll devise an "additional reading" section for each chapter. We are now working on the last 1/3 of the book and intend to finish by early December, and also get the first version of the website alive.

Yesterday we also had an internal briefing in IBM about the book, and this is the slide that ended our presentation.

On Defining "EVENT" in Earnest

Professional books are not that funny, this is left for comedies. My favorite comedy of all times is Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of being Earnest". In Hebrew it was translated literally to something like "The importance of seriousness", and everybody who know what it is talking about understands that this translation totally misses the point of this comedy. Anyway, I recalled Oscar Wilde's old play, when reading the book by Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte recently, since they have in their book a section called "defining "EVENT" in Earnest". In this section they are saying that there are three school of thoughts about how EVENT is defined:

• State-change view - an event is a change in the state of something and as such is reported. Its properties: a change must occur, and this change must be reported. Example: An item previously outside the range of RFID reader, is now within the range of this RFID reader.
• Happening view -- an event is anything that happens, or is contemplated as happening (the EPTS glossary definition), in this case, a change must occur, but its reporting to the system is optional, not every event according to this definition is of interest to be reported. Example: A person sending Email
• Detectable-condition view -- an event is a detectable condition that can trigger a notification, in this case a change does not have to occur, but reporting should occur. Example: A GPS devise reporting track location (note -- location may not have changed since last report. since the track driver went for lunch).

This is an interesting observation, some people argue that only the first type is an event, while the other types are not. My view is that all the above are actually events. The question is whether we can come with an inclusive, agreed upon definition of event, maybe the glossary team (co-lead by Roy Schulte) should take this challenge.

More about event types - later.

On the Event-Driven Architecture book

Last in the series of 2009 event related books is the book entitled: "Event-driven architecture - How SOA enables the Real-Time Enterprise". This book was published early this year, and I actually purchased it while visiting the USA earlier this year, and while doing the other book reviews it is a good time to write about this book as well.

The book, unlike the others, does not deal with event processing, it deals with EDA as a central concept, starting with a "working definition": event-driven architecture is one that has the ability to detect events and react intelligently on them. I have some trouble to digest this definition, since in my mind, architectures don't possess abilities. Part I of the book talks about "The Theory of EDA", in which it starts with a second "working systemic definition" saying that EDA is the complete array of architectural elements, including design, planning, technology, organization, and so on, which enables the ability to disseminate event immediately to all interest parties, human or automated. So now this is a definition of architecture for event/message routing, but I already noted that this is not about event processing. Next it goes in depth about the relationships between EDA and SOA, explaining on its way what SOA is. The metaphor used throughout is a nervous system, and this is talking about enterprise nervous systems, the discussion about SOA and related concepts spans over four chapters, ending with some hints of how to calculate ROI of selecting architecture style, but the ROI discussion remains in title levels. The second part of the book goes from theory to practice, in this case they are saying that the products implementing EDA are called ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), and (rightfully) claiming that the main gap in using EDA is that people are not used to think in EDA. However, while they have a chapter called "thinking EDA", its insights of how to "think EDA" stay in a very high level area. Going from the thinking to the examples, the book discusses in big details three examples: Airline flight control, Anti-money laundering, and event-driven productivity infrastructure (under this name there is a description of a framework to connect workflows, E-mail, phone, document repositories, blogs, wikis, social networks and some other stuff).

The book ends after these four example chapters (which actually take more than 50% of the pages), without any conclusion chapter.

It seems that the examples are the essence of the book, and the previous chapters are introduction, the examples also remain in the transport level, and while in one of the example "rule engines" are mentioned as part of the architecture, the book says very little about them.

Looking at the reviews in Amazon, it has polar opinions going from 1 star to 5 starts, I guess that I am somewhere in the middle, for somebody who does not have a clue about what EDA is it provides simple non-technical explanation, and such people found it useful; however, I agree with the 1 star reviewer that it does not really making a convincing story on the sub-title promise - "How SOA enables the real-time enterprise".

This completes my book reviews. We'll see some more books in this area coming in 2010.

On Stream Data Processing book by Chkravarthy and Jiang

Another related book that arrived yesterday is the book entitled: "Stream Data Processing: A Quality of Service Perspective - modeling, scheduling, load shedding and complex event processing".

First - let's start with a lesson in economics. Looking at the Amazon query about "event processing books", one can realize that the Amazon price for the book of Chandy and Schulte that I described yesterday is $32.97, the new EDA book, by Taylor et al costs in Amazon $37.30, and the book I am talking about today has Amazon price of $112.45 -- roughly a price of four books. So the economic question is what makes it so expensive? My guess is that the answer is that books of the type of the two referred book (and probably our upcoming book is within the same category) relies on the fact that people will want to buy these books out of their own pocket, while academic books, especially part of Springer series (this one is part of the series "Advances in Database Systems"), have captive audience of university libraries. I wonder how many people are willing to pay this price out of their own pocket for that book.

Now -- from the business side to the book itself. Sharma is an old colleague from my active database days. The book takes a database approach and starts by explaining why data streams are paradigm shift relative to traditional databases, then it moves to explain the notion of data streams, and gets into QoS metrics, moving to data stream challenges, and introduces CEP as a complementary technology whose support as part of the data stream management system is posed as a challenge, follows by a literature review, including a survey of commercial and open sources stream and CEP systems, that seems to me to have false positives and false negatives. Then start the more academic oriented discussion about modeling continuous queries, with theorems and Greek letters, next is discussion about engineering oriented aspects of DSMS like scheduling and load shedding.

After discussing all this, the authors move to discuss integration between stream and complex event processing, starting with differences, and stating that it will be difficult to combine incompatible execution models, nevertheless, the authors are not afraid of difficulties and a page later describe an integrated architecture, which is a layered architecture, where the stream processing is done first, as a result there is a phase of event generation, as a second layer, where the event processing is a third layer, and rule processing as a fourth layer. I think that strict hierarchical architectures are somewhat simplistic for realistic scenarios (I'll need to write something about it at later point) , then the authors dedicate two chapters to describe their prototypes, and the books concludes with conclusions and future directions, but they seem to be ideas to extend the current issues discussed.

Bottom line -- seems like an academic journal paper that has scaled up (324 pages including long list of references (not lexicographically sorted), and index. May have interest to those who wants to study the formal aspects of stream processing.

I also got with the package two books about causality models, but I need to read them first before making any comment on them.

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.

On some authors' dilemmas

This is an illustration of the "prisoner's dilemma", a known concept from game theory. These days I am facing some smaller scale dilemmas that do not include decisions about imprisonment, but relate to the book that I am writing together with Peter Niblett - Event Processing in Action



After completing the first 1/3 of the book, the draft have been sent to many "anonymous reviewers". Yesterday I got the result of 11 reviewers, they generally liked the draft, some of them made comments that demonstrate some of the dilemmas of writing such a book. The dilemma stems from the fact that the target audience is not monolithic, and this is evident by variety of opinions. Which reminds me that many years ago I have taught a basic first-year ("freshmen") university course, and in this course there has been a lab in which the teaching assistant taught them some products (I think it was MS-Access), one of the teaching assistants told me that one student asked him what version of the software should be used, and another student asked him how to insert the floppy disk (remember?) to the disk drive. It was difficult to teach such heterogeneous audience. In the book target audience there is less polarization, but still there is a variety: people who are part of the "event processing community", people who are somewhat familiar with event processing (or think they are familiar), and people who don't know if event is written with "v" or with "w"... The target audience is further segmented to: developers that are interested only in the technical side, system architects / designers who are interested to understand principles, students or newcomers to the area, who are interested to study the area. One of the facets of this diversity is that one reviewer wrote that we should write more about the business motivation since the most important thing is to explain decision makers what is the value of event processing to the enterprise, while another reviewer thought that the introduction is boring and that we should move directly to chapter 3 that starts with the technical stuff. The way we chose is to have an introduction chapter provides an overview, gives ten different examples that represent different types of event processing application, explanation of the various reasons for doing event processing and some key terms. We decided that one introduction chapter is enough for those who want to get some notion of what is the motivation, and may still be of interest to those who already know or are not really interested in motivations, just in technical details. There is another book being written which is dedicated to the business side (by Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte) for those who would like to get a complete business oriented book - our book is more for the technical audience. For those who are not interested -- we'll recommend in the preface to skip this chapter. I'll write more about some other authors' dilemma in subsequent postings.

On Event Processing related Books

The amount of books related to event processing is growing, and in the next year or so there will be several books added to the already existing one, looking at event processing from different angles.

First let's review the existing books.

"The power of Events" by David Luckham was the pioneering book in this area and became an icon by its own right, the book was published in 2002, and influenced the thinking in this area, including the name coined "complex event processing" that is in use as a name being used for various products in this area.

The book "Distributed Event-Based Systems" by three members of the research community: Gero Mühl, Ludger Fiege, and Peter Pietzuch. It should be noted that the "DEBS" community which concentrated around pub/sub and distributed middleware, has joined forces with the community that deal with event processing languages, architectures and execution models to form the event processing community.
This book published in 2006 deals mostly with the infrastructure that enables event-based interaction (such as: pub/sub) and is a good textbook on the infrastructure topics.
The book "Event-Driven Architecture - how SOA enables the Real-Time Enterprise" is a new book by Hugh Taylor, Angela Yochem, Les Phillips, and Frank Martinez available also as a Kindle book. I have not read it yet, but from the title it seems to look at EDA as a SOA pattern. Will add it to my next periodic Amazon order.

Now - to future books. Amazon also shows a book that has not been released yet, by Sharma Chakravarty one of the veterans of active databases and Qingchun Jiang. The book is entitled: "Stream Data Processing: A Quality of Service Perspective", and has "Complex Event Processing" is its sub-title, seems to be a monograph about Sharma's approach to unify stream and complex event processing that he presented in the DEBS 2008.
Annika Hinze and Alex Buchmann, again, two persons from the academia, well known in the community. Their intended book is a collection of articles, entitled: "Handbook of Research on Advanced Distributed Event-Based Systems, Publish/Subscribe and Message Filtering Technologies", and is geared towards the research community. I don't know the schedule.

Another forthcoming book by well known figures in our community: Roy Schulte and Mani Chandy is entitled: "Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies".

This book will provide business oriented view of event processing and its relations with various part of the enterprise architecture (SOA, BPM, BI).

Last but not least, the book that Peter Niblett and myself are writing entitles "Event Processing in Action", the book focuses on the building blocks of constructing event processing applications, and provides a deep dive of application building using a use case.

The fact that various publishers have taken the investment in event processing oriented book is an indication of the interest in this area. Enriching the community with several books with different viewpoints and focus area will help in both the understanding and teaching event processing concepts and facilities.