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In the Drools vision of a unified behavioral modelling platform, Drools Fusion is the module responsible for enabling event processing behavior.
Although several tries were made, there isn't up to date any broadly accepted definition on the term Complex Event Processing. The term Event by itself is frequently overloaded and used to refer to several different things, depending on the context it is used. Defining terms is not the goal of this guide and as so, lets adopt a loose definition that, although not formal, will allow us to proceed with a common understanding.
So, in the scope of this guide:
For instance, on a Stock Broker application, when a sell operation is executed, it causes a change of state in the domain. This change of state can be observed on several entities in the domain, like the price of the securities that changed to match the value of the operation, the owner of the individual traded assets that change from the seller to the buyer, the balance of the accounts from both seller and buyer that are credited and debited, etc. Depending on how the domain is modelled, this change of state may be represented by a single event, multiple atomic events or even hierarchies of correlated events. In any case, in the context of this guide, Event is the record of the change on a particular data in the domain.
Events are processed by computer systems since they were invented, and throughout the history, systems responsible for that were given different names and different methodologies were employed. It wasn't until the 90's though, that a more focused work started on EDA (Event Driven Architecture) with a more formal definition on the requirements and goals for event processing. Old messaging systems started to change to address such requirements and new systems started to be developed with the single purpose of event processing. Two trends were born under the names of Event Stream Processing and Complex Event Processing.
In the very beginnings, Event Stream Processing was focused on the capabilities of processing streams of events in (near) real time, where the main focus of Complex Event Processing was on the correlation and composition of atomic events into complex (compound) events. An important (maybe the most important) milestone was the publishing of the Dr. David Luckham's book "The Power of Events" in 2002. In the book, Dr Luckham introduces the concept of Complex Event Processing and how it can be used to enhance systems that deal with events. Over the years, both trends converged to a common understanding and today these systems are all referred as CEP systems.
This is a very simplistic explanation to a really complex and fertile field of research, but sets a very high level and common understanding for the concepts this guide will introduce.
The current understanding of what Complex Event Processing is may be briefly described as the following quote from Wikipedia:
"Complex Event Processing, or CEP, is primarily an event processing concept that deals with the task of processing multiple events with the goal of identifying the meaningful events within the event cloud. CEP employs techniques such as detection of complex patterns of many events, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events such as causality, membership, and timing, and event-driven processes." | ||
| --Wikipedia | ||
In other words, CEP is about detecting and selecting the interesting events (and only them) from an event cloud, finding their relationships and inferring new data from them and their relationships.
For the remaining of this guide, we will use the terms Complex Event Processing and CEP as a broad reference for any of the related technologies and techniques, including but not limited to, CEP, Complex Event Processing, ESP, Event Stream Processing and Event Processing in general.
Event Processing use cases, in general, share several requirements and goals with Business Rules use cases. These overlaps happen both on the business side and on the technical side.
On the Business side:
Business rules are frequently defined based on the occurrence of scenarios triggered by events. Examples could be:
On an algorithmic trading application: take an action if the security price increases X% compared to the day opening price, where the price increases are usually denoted by events on a Stock Trade application.
On a monitoring application: take an action if the temperature on the server room increases X degrees in Y minutes, where sensor readings are usually denoted by events.
Both business rules and event processing queries change frequently and require immediate response for the business to adapt itself to new market conditions, new regulations and new enterprise policies.
From a technical perspective:
Both require seamless integration with the enterprise infrastructure and applications, specially on autonomous governance, including, but not limited to, lifecycle management, auditing, security, etc.
Both have functional requirements like pattern matching and non-functional requirements like response time and query/rule explanation.
Even sharing requirements and goals, historically, both fields were born appart and although the industry evolved and one can find good products on the market, they either focus on event processing or on business rules management. That is due not only because of historical reasons but also because, even overlapping in part, use cases do have some different requirements.
Drools was also born as a rules engine several years ago, but following the vision of becoming a single platform for behavioral modelling, it soon realized that it could only achieve this goal by crediting the same importance to the three complementary business modelling techniques:
Business Rules Management
Business Processes Management
Complex Event Processing
In this context, Drools Fusion is the module responsible for adding event processing capabilities into the platform.
Supporting Complex Event Processing, though, is much more than simply understanding what an event is. CEP scenarios share several common and distinguishing characteristics:
Usually required to process huge volumes of events, but only a small percentage of the events are of real interest.
Events are usually immutable, since they are a record of state change.
Usually the rules and queries on events must run in reactive modes, i.e., react to the detection of event patterns.
Usually there are strong temporal relationships between related events.
Individual events are usually not important. The system is concerned about patterns of related events and their relationships.
Usually, the system is required to perform composition and aggregation of events.
Based on this general common characteristics, Drools Fusion defined a set of goals to be achieved in order to support Complex Event Processing appropriately:
Support Events, with their proper semantics, as first class citizens.
Allow detection, correlation, aggregation and composition of events.
Support processing of Streams of events.
Support temporal constraints in order to model the temporal relationships between events.
Support sliding windows of interesting events.
Support a session scoped unified clock.
Support the required volumes of events for CEP use cases.
Support to (re)active rules.
Support adapters for event input into the engine (pipeline).
The above list of goals are based on the requirements not covered by Drools Expert itself, since in a unified platform, all features of one module are leveraged by the other modules. This way, Drools Fusion is born with enterprise grade features like Pattern Matching, that is paramount to a CEP product, but that is already provided by Drools Expert. In the same way, all features provided by Drools Fusion are leveraged by Drools Flow (and vice-versa) making process management aware of event processing and vice-versa.
For the remaining of this guide, we will go through each of the features Drools Fusion adds to the platform. All these features are available to support different use cases in the CEP world, and the user is free to select and use the ones that will help him model his business use case.