Four years from now, IT managers will adopt an
event-driven architecture (EDA) for the sort of complex event
processing attempted only by sophisticated developers, a Gartner
analyst has predicted.
Roy Schulte made his prediction at Gartner's Web Services and
Application Conference last week, even though another Gartner
analyst estimated that two-thirds of IT departments have yet to
take up the service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach.
Fortunately, the EDA approach is complementary to SOA, which
forward-thinking IT shops are starting to employ in greater numbers
as they forge ahead with web services. Taking an SOA-based
approach, developers build an application by assembling "services,"
or software components that define reusable business functions.
But Schulte said connecting services occurs in a linear,
predictable sequence, whereas an event-driven architecture allows
for multiple, less predictable, asynchronous events to happen in
parallel and trigger a single action.
Simple event-driven processing has been in common use for at
least 10 years with technology such as IBM's or Tibco Software's
message-oriented middleware and, in the past few years,
message-driven Enterprise JavaBeans.
But Schulte predicted that complex event processing (CEP) will
start to become mainstream in 2007, as application developers and
systems and business analysts strive to do more business in real
time. Paving the way for the trend will be faster networks, the
arrival of general-purpose event management software tools and the
emergence of standards for event processing beginning in 2005, he
said.
Hints that CEP will become mainstream include Tibco's
acquisition of Praja and IBM's work on event-broker technology,
Schulte claimed. "It's obviously the first step for IBM, and the
next step will be complex event processing."
To prepare for EDA, Schulte advised companies to look at their
application requirements to see if there are places where they
could do simple event processing instead of SOA to design part of
an application. Leading-edge companies should also look to
implement complex event processing for applications that bring a
competitive advantage.
Meanwhile, Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer estimated that no more
than 30% of IT shops are doing SOA-based development by design, and
among that group, less than half are doing it consistently well.
But he predicted that 85% will be building applications using SOA
concepts five years from now.
The SOA concept is not new, but SOA has become a buzzword in the
realm of web services. Services are exposed to one another through
standards-based interfaces, and SOAP is used to send XML-based
messages between them. Because components are loosely coupled,
developers can easily swap them out and, in theory, gain the
benefit of code reuse.