Uuaaaaaaah!

Strange sound? It's just the yawning of an awakening blog. Yes, I've got to admit that I've not even stopped to write here in my holidays. I've even forgot to start writing after my holidays ended. *sigh*

But that doesn't mean that I've stopped everything. Beside the continuing of our renovation - only the rear corridor and some smaller tasks are left - I've continued my development and started the preparing a conference session. And both are about very similar topics. I'm now working with distributed solutions since many years, but mostly typical N-tier applications with horizontal scaling using multiple web or application servers, EAI, or SOA. Now my focus switches to concurrent distributed solutions and EDA.

Today we more and more get networked using system with more and more processors or cores. IT systems are woven into our work and into our private life. So while in earlier times it has been enough to write an application which behaves almost autistic and concentrates on doing things one after each other developers today have to handle more complex scenarios. Their systems have to be able to parallelize work to use the new infrastructure, react on different kinds of stimmulations and events, analyze them if they are related, and process them the regular way as well as perform autonomous actions based on the analyze results. The typical flow inside an application is changing and gets more and more natural.

While this may lead to extreme powerful solutions the developer needs an infrastructure to develope and operate them. Especially the dynamic behaviour resulting out of the event evaluation is hard to control and even harder to debug. So my Tideland Events and Services tries to provide an infrastructure for event-driven applications based on Erlang. It contains - or will contain -

• services for the processing of events,


• channels for the distribution of events to subscribed services,


• aspects for the pre and post processing of events,


• automatic service and channel discovery in a network of nodes,


• restoring of service states in case of a service restart, and


• contexts as an environment for related events.

Additionally I'll add internal and remote monitoring features and adapters for the integration of external clients. Alltogether the EAS surely will be no middleware for a real EDA, but a small platform for event-driven Erlang applicationswell integrated into the OTP.