SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all Complementary
by David Luckham
Part 1
Approaches to designing and managing information systems have proliferated over the past 15 years, so much so that the space of technical concepts has become quite confusing. There is the SOA arena (service oriented architectures), the BPM arena (business process management), and more recent arrivals in the area of event processing (EP) including event driven architectures (EDA) and complex event processing (CEP). Some of these technical movements, particularly SOA and EDA, have often been viewed as competing or conflicting, and religious wars have threatened to break out from time to time.
However, the truth is that at the conceptual level they are complementary, and they all have a role to play in design and management of IT systems.
- April 30th, 2007
7 Responses to “SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all Complementary”
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SOA and EDA are complimentary as are EDA and BPM. They represent different ways to bring services (components) together to solve business problems. I would go further and say that decision services are the right way to bring rules into SOA. I have blogged before about SOA, BPM, CEP and business rules and why business rules matter in an event-driven SOA. I think event driven design is particularly suitable for what I call transaction-centric decisioning too and that’s a good thing.
I also recommend two articles in SOA magazine – this one on business rules in SOA and this one on SOA and EDA.
EDA, SOA and Decisioning (again)…
Steve Jones had this post on SOA v EDA while David Luckham posted on why SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all complementary. I think these two have it right – SOA and EDA are complimentary as are EDA and BPM…….
I agree that it is very natural to supplement “traditional” SOA (Request/Reply) with EDA to get a much better SOA (see for example an article on solving BI problems in SOA with EDA)
However I think that EDA can also live as an architectural style in it own right (i.e. without SOA)
[...] In a nutshell, we can easily see that all of the components of the CEP functional reference architecture we discussed earlier, events, event pre-processing, event refinement, situational refinement and impact assessment, add value only if they lead to high confidence, resource efficient actions. This is one of the motivations behind David Luckham’s recently posted white paper, SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all Complementary. [...]
[...] In part 1 (link) we argued that SOA and EDA are complementary architectural design concepts, and that the fusion of the two, event-driven SOA (or ED-SOA) should be the design philosophy of both SOA and EDA today. [...]
Event Server…
1.Overview SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all Complementary(Part1…
[...] In a nutshell, we can easily see that all of the components of the CEP functional reference architecture we discussed earlier, events, event pre-processing, event refinement, situational refinement and impact assessment, add value only if they lead to high confidence, resource efficient actions. This is one of the motivations behind David Luckham’s recently posted white paper, SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all Complementary. [...]