<<I attended the 1st International SOA Symposium in the Amsterdam ArenA at 6 and 7 october. The reason why I attended this symposium was because EDA came to the scene. But I really was disappointed.
Clemens Utschig-Utschig and Manas Deb (Oracle) together spent a complete presentation titled - "SOA and EDA" - to the subject. I did not one moment notice the architecture aspect during their talk. Clemens and all the others I listened to mention EDA and start talking about complex event processing; that is not architecture, that is technique. The clue with EDA is to drive your architectural approach from a business events perspective, just like SOA is driven from a business services perspective. CEP is a way of processing messages (fair enough to name these messages "events"). That was clearly understood and explained by all of the "EDA-speakers". But EDA is about how business events drive the overall architecture of the IT-systems and it is about how these events should be modeled. EDA it is not primarily about the ability to process and correlate streams of thousands of messages per second as the speakers were trying us to believe. The real EDA paradigm was one step to far for all of the respective speakers, unfortunately. Another misconception was that the speakers I heard were trying to convince the audience to only pass the references to data in the message, WRONG! One of the architectural principals behind EDA is self-contained documents that describe events. Passing references (primary keys) is a performance trade-off, not an architectural principal. Passing references creates dependencies to sources the might be out of your scope or control; it assumes knowledge of reference data. Passing references is a pattern toward tight coupling in stead of toward loose coupling. My conclusion is that EDA is not yet well understood in the market. Perhaps next year?>> You can read this blog at: http://soa-eda.blogspot.com/
