BEA recently announced WebLogic Event Server, a Java application server designed for event-driven applications and WebLogic Real Time 2.0 a new release of BEA's real-time technology.
Event-driven architectures include simple event processing, complex event processing (CEP) and event stream processing (ESP) are an in area that the Gartner group is poised for significant growth. Although the servers and frameworks that target event processing are used primarily in organizations that are very clearly event-driven (capital markets, fraud detection, network monitoring), most environments are at least partially driven by a stream of events, and might find that an event-driven architecture makes some problems more tractable.
BEA's event server offers an SQL-like event processing language which can be used to locate an event or pattern of events within an event stream (or within a sliding or batched window of an event stream) or even transform one event stream into another.
Although WebLogic Event Server is at version 2.0, this is the first public release for BEA, currently in beta, with general availability expected for Summer 2007. However, it joins other complex event processing and event-stream processing servers/frameworks such as Esper and NEsper (Java and .NET respectively), Apama and others.
BEA believes that WebLogic Event Server will offer a compelling experience because it contains an event-processing engine integrated with a "lightweight but full featured application server", which could reduce the overhead involved in taking up event processing, and make it easier to integrate event processing with existing applications and web services. For demanding environments where timing is critical, WebLogic Event Server can also be combined with WebLogic Real Time 2.0. Ruma Sanyal, the product marketing director for Event Server and Real Time, speaking with InfoQ, expanded:
If you need 100% guaranteed predictability of response time, WebLogic Real Time will provide that. WebLogic Real time will also bring the latency down on average to microseconds, as opposed to if WebLogic Event Server was using a 'regular' JVM
WebLogic Real Time 2.0 offers improved timing guarantees, with a "guaranteed worst-case pause time of ten milliseconds" and "guaranteed sub-millisecond response time for standard java."
Sun Microsystems recently announced a real-time system for Java. Speaking about some of the competition, Guy Churchward, Vice President of WebLogic Products said:
Unlike other Java platforms that claim real-time performance, WebLogic Real Time supports standard applications with no special architectures, language extensions or APIs. Version 2.0, with 10-millisecond worst-case pause time, is the new industry standard for latency-sensitive IT environments.
In addition, Real Time 2.0 offers a latency analyzer tool to help "analyze and tune sources of latency in their applications". Tuning is an important part of ensuring an application meets its real-time goals, and so tool support for this area may make life easier for developers of real-time systems.
For more information, continue reading the WebLogic Event Server documentation, or read more about Real Time, Real Time Java, or Event Stream Processing here at InfoQ.
