Book Authors:  Opher Etzion & Peter Niblett

Book Publisher:  Manning Publications

Book Review by Pethuru Raj (peterindia@gmail.com)

                 Events are increasingly turning out to be the most compact, catalytic, and comprehensive building-block / abstraction unit in realizing dynamic, adaptive and real-time ICT applications. Business and real-world events are being given enhanced importance these days as they define, derive and dictate new-generation software-intensive and mission-critical systems. Events are being procured, polished, processed, persisted, and presented for cognitively empowering ICT systems to take informed decisions, to contemplate and complete adept counter-measures in real time. Events are the most elegant entity encapsulating a variety of actionable insights and intelligence in the form of trends, tips, patterns, associations, alerts, etc. Messaging has been positioned as the most reliable mechanism for transmitting events across the initiated and the interested parties.  There are several buzzwords originating and being derived out of spectacular advancements in this hot and happening field of event orientation. Event driven architecture (EDA), event processing systems and networks, event heaps, event processing engines, business activity monitoring (BAM), event-driven service oriented architecture (ED-SOA), Business intelligence (BI), business process and performance management fields, business rule management system (BRMS), knowledge engine (KE) etc. are the most sought-after concepts and contributions.

                 There are consolidated, virtualised and sharable infrastructures emerging and evolving in order to concurrently capture, analyze, mine, and extract useful information from streams of events from different, distributed and decentralised resources. Data and information oozing out lead to the much-proclaimed knowledge that in turn clearly and cleverly feed for the forthcoming knowledge era. Futuristic systems are being projected and presented as the cognition-enabled artifacts. And here events sourced, sanctified, secured, and stored, play a very critical and crucial role in shaping up and sustaining the next-generation personal as well as professionals ICT systems. The business landscape is already resonating and radiating with SOA and EDA paradigms and their seamless and spontaneous synchronization goes a long way in establishing and evolving resilient and versatile systems.  

                 Chapter 1 provides a bird's-eye view of event processing. It explains what we mean by events and event-driven behaviour. It includes some examples and relates them to different types of event processing. It also positions event processing within the enterprise computing universe and introduces the Fast Flower Delivery example application that will accompany throughout the book.  

                Chapter 2 discusses the architectural concepts and building blocks required to construct event processing systems. 

                 Chapter 3 deals with the event type building block which represents the event metadata.  

                 Chapter 4 discusses event producers that introduce events into event processing systems.  

                 Chapter 5 discusses event consumers that consume the output events.  

                 Chapter 6 covers the notion of an event processing network and its associated building blocks: event processing agent, event channel, and global state element.

                 Chapter 7 discusses the context building block.  

                 Chapters 8 and 9 go into specific types of event processing agents in depth. Chapter 8 discusses the transformation and filtering types of event processing agents, and chapter 9 discusses pattern matching event processing agents. 

                  On concluding, this is really an informative and inspiring book on event processing for technocrats and architects who are tasked with designing and developing event-based business systems and the authors have taken severe pains in order to explain several application domains and use / business / technical cases for the fledgling field. Authors have dug deeper in order to present a volley of right and relevant information for the readers.  Pictures lavishly decorate the whole book in order to illustrate various finer points. A representative example is introduced in the first chapter and all kinds of allied means and mechanisms in the subsequent chapters are being carefully corroborated using this sample example.  In a nutshell, a well-written and succulent book for avid and articulate professionals, pundits and professors indeed!