Robin Smith's Blog

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Robin Smith is the Senior Engineering Product Manager at BEA Systems for the WebLogic Time and Event Driven (TED) Product Family. Before coming to BEA he was a Product Manager for many years at Sun Microsystems where he managed the award winning, Java Studio Enterprise and several core infrastructure products. He has worked as a software engineer and architect for two decades, designing and developing numerous scalable and robust commercial applications, such as a VM Operating System Performance monitor and system management products for the AS/400.

'Event Transforming' EDA, CEP Visualized Eclipse IDE Application Development

The creation of Event Driven Architecture based applications which can leverage the power of Complex Event Processing can be a daunting task, but now with the evolution of unique BEA Eclipse IDE tooling, customers are able to build, publish and debug, in a matter of minutes, very powerful "event'ing" solutions with the WebLogic® Event Server. As developers extend their knowledge of the new application and programming models available, the associated application event processing network (EPN)  is also evolving in complexity. The EPN is one of the core principles of our EDA implementation and defines the adapters, streams and processors, together with the event listeners, which effectively addresses the Event Stream processing needs of any solution.

So, we are now seeing a growing need for a visualization approach as another stepping stone to achieving simplistic creation of very powerful event driven applications.

The latest Eclipse tooling 2.1 version, available from our eclipse update site,  addresses this issue "head-on" with the first of many planned updates, highlighting an Event Server Eclipse project artifact collection visually on the IDE "canvas". The Event Server Project Wizard steps you through a few simple tasks to complete the Java foundation of the application, and then your development environment immediately portrays the EPN, with easy to use features such as scaling, saving and printing the network of nodes image.

With the cool, direct node to code access, developers can enhance and augment the EPN in one click of the mouse, expanding the applications capabilities in seconds.

A great new screencast is now available which steps us through the lifecycle fundamentals of developing an Event Driven Application, leveraging the EPN visualization aspects, as a core method to understand and manipulate  the application structure and to easily extend its functionality.

For more details on our unique focused approach to the world of Event Stream processing, including Complex Event processing and our lightweight, Equinox OSGi™ based Java container, built from the ground up specifically for the low latency and high through-put needs across industries, check out my other blogs.

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Equinox OSGi™, the 'Event-transformers' platform foundation

When we launched the WebLogic® Event Server 2.0 last year, it was designed from the ground up to provide the most lightweight, low latency EDA focused server environment possible.  We saw the problems that folks in sectors like finance and the  military were having with existing platforms and designed Event Server from the ground up, leveraging our microServices Architecture, based on the Equinox OSGi™ implementation, to give them the leanest, fastest environments possible for mission critical real-time applications. Combined with our latest Eclipse IDE tooling for fast EDA application construction and execution, BEA is now offering a complete and comprehensive ' Event-transformers' solution. To find out more about our implementation and how it  revolutionizes Event-Driven Application Development, see the latest case study http://dev2dev.bea.com/downloads/BEA_Equinox.pdf

'Event-transformers' Turbo charge your Event Processing EDA solutions

The WebLogic® Event Server was released this summer, as the very first and only Event Processing “Application” Server based on the BEA microServices Architecture, focused on delivering the real power of Complex Event Processing coupled with extreme low latency and high event through-put.

The whole essence of this complete Event Processing ‘middleware’ solution is that BEA has, and will continue to leverage the very latest technologies such as its unique deterministic JVM garbage collection features and a highly tuned Java container with an OSGi backplane.

Created from the ground up with an OSGi modular framework every aspect of the product has been built for performance through-put, but at the same time still ensuring application latencies in the sub-millisecond range. In addition to a wealth of configurable and programmable capabilities,  this Java runtime and container is the ideal solution for organizations that need a scaleable Event Processing implementation.

As more and more Companies adopt these new products and gain the major advantages possible from this kind of implementation, the team at BEA has been very committed to ‘stressing’ the new Java Container and the unique Java Runtime (WebLogic® Real Time) to understand just some of performance speeds possible, by scaling its capabilities with a fairly typical use case for high event through-put performance. Of course, there are many different kinds of implementations possible around Event Processing, and we suspect the high performance possibilities of our advanced solution may be limitless, but we want to provide a foundational information base for companies now who want to evaluate purely at the performance level.

So recently, in the BEA performance labs (the result being formally published in a new BEA whitepaper ) , the team implemented a financial services benchmark testing scenario to identify a ‘low tide’ benchmark level for latency and event through-put that can be achieved.

The monitored application was not just a simple event “pass-through” type of example, where no ‘real’ CEP is performed that provides just t a façade of high numbers but has no real value for enterprise strength solutions. This scenario implemented around 400 pattern matching queries on the inbound data stream with significant high complexity. One of the major 'configurability' capabilities of the WebLogic Event Server can be observed in the way parallel processing is achieved by enabling multiple container connections to be introduced.

The resulting statistics were amazing, as the load generator ramped up the message injection rate to over 200 thousand events per second, the latencies were less than 50 microseconds, and with over 1 million events per second only around 69 microsecond latency, this is just an indication of the extreme processing power of the Event Server.

Below is a graph showing just some of the results, but to get all the details, I highly recommend you review the complete whitepaper from the BEA website.

Together with the ability to meet and exceed an Enterprise goals in terms of performance, there is also a need for Visualized Event Processing Network monitoring, providing the capability to instantly identify these through-puts and latencies for each node.

So not only does the WebLogic Event Server provide a comprehensive JMX framework for users to interact and extract the information programmatically, but BEA is launching soon a new value-add diagnostic focused feature which visually and graphically exposes these interfaces in many ways to review and analyze the activity of executing Event based applications.

Using this component, the WebLogic Event Server Monitoring Dashboard, you can easily identify the Applications which are executing in an Event Server instance and the performance of the associated EPN nodes (Adapters, Streams and Processors).

Historical analysis around the performance of EDA applications is aided with some nice features, such as the PDF report generation option, which will enable developers to record and study the effects of changes to their applications as they implement different features and EPL queries.

The Monitoring dashboard must be installed with the WebLogic Event Server 2.0 base product and will form the foundation for other ‘cool’ new visual diagnostic tools, joining a ‘family’ of a new breed of Event Server tooling from BEA, which will provide a wide range of capabilities addressing the needs of EDA developers, Architects and Business users.

For more information on the Monitoring dashboard, I recommend that you look at the screencast available on dev2dev.bea.com.

Java 'Event-transformers' evolving and developing Real Time EDA Applications

Over the years I have been able to develop applications in many languages, with by far my favorites being 370/Assembler and C. The intense pleasure of manipulating a processor register-by-register to perform complex calculations and execute at high speed was a joy to behold. My ability to closely handle memory operations and produce sophisticated solutions, which only I could eventually debug and maintain was sheer delight (and great for job retention!).

However, those days are now passing, and as the adoption and creativity of the Java language has grown over the last 10 years or so, I, like so many others, understand the overwhelming benefits that this language can bring, such as accelerating the time to market of solutions giving Enterprise's a competitive edge, ease of maintenance, and the significant cost saving in resources and development for the Enterprise, to name just a few.

Advances in Java infrastructure solutions such as the WebLogic Real Time product, which can provide the low latency determinism needed for Real Time Java applications, without developers giving up the wide range of Java language benefits, especially its memory management abilities, will surely facilitate an increasing rise amongst the Java community building these types of next generation applications. 

To further advance towards the ease of use and accelerated development goal for Java Real time applications, a new feature set for the Eclipse IDE will make its entrance into the developer "domain" later this week, with the general worldwide availability of the WebLogic Event Server Development Environment, providing Java developers with the ability to dynamically create, deploy (publish) and debug EDA-based Enterprise strength applications, as highlighted recently in the dev2dev screencast.

To get to “grips” with the real value of using the Java language in general, BEA has produced a new whitepaper to “wash away” the muddy waters on this topic and clearly identify the cost benefits and other factors involved, so that companies can make a more objective decision moving forward with new infrastructure solution projects. If you want to read more on this subject then I recommend the “Total Cost of Ownership: A Comparison of C/C++ and Java” whitepaper which is now available and can provide some valuable insight.

The new WebLogic Real Time and WebLogic Event Server products are now generally available worldwide, so please take some time to review the new dev2dev pages, EDSOA information and then download the products for evaluation.

Watch this space for a new WebLogic Event Server monitoring dashboard value add-on feature arriving in a few weeks, to enable users to investigate the deployed (published) EPA (EPN) Applications and related statistics, such as node-level message through-put and latency values.

Event-Transformers for Event Driven Architecture Unite!

I'm Robin Smith, Senior Engineering Product Manager at BEA Systems for the WebLogic Time and Event Driven (TED) Product Family. Welcome fellow "Event-transformers" to my blog. If you are here, then one can presume that you are reading all of the exciting news on the web and in the press about BEA’s new EDSOA (Event-driven SOA). Any casual observer may perhaps expect that this is just marketing "fluff", perhaps a simple "bolt on" extension to the WebLogic Server or maybe some specific implementation of a core CEP "engine" application (possibly even written in C++). Well, it's not.

So let me clarify. For some time past, the BEA team took a "step back" to consider and study the industries, and the available technologies which might be needed to effectively solve Real Time Event Driven Architecture and Event Processing Network Application demands. It was soon apparent that a totally new approach would be needed. To get to "neural-like" processing complexity and extreme low latency for the next generation Java applications, the solution should first be found in delivering a foundational runtime infrastructure that addresses the inherent deficiencies relating to latency "pauses" found in general purpose server-side Java Virtual Machines (JVMs).

Secondly, to satisfy the multitude of services required now, and in the future, for EDA applications, including Complex Event Processing, as just one service of many, a new Java container would be needed. This should also be a "deterministic" container, which could inherently and "transparently" provide a wealth of integrated real time design principles and concepts to effectively deal with other possible "middleware" latency constraints. Providing this kind of solution would enable all managed and deployed applications to meet their Enterprise functionality goals, without the need to program to any "special", complex and possibly, difficult to maintain API’s , such as the self management of memory allocations and release.

This Java container should also not be a "heavy-weight" Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition specification (or historically, J2EE) based) implementation, but a "targeted vehicle" for its real time purpose. Ideally, it should leverage all of the latest innovations, perhaps being built using an mSA (micro-services Architecture), with all of the added benefits that can offer, such as providing an OSGi backplane.

Once this "nirvana like" EDA focused container is delivered, together with the "worlds fastest" Java server-side runtime, then it is time to evolve some visually impressive and intuitive tooling to simplify the use of this middleware. These RAD and BAM capabilities will accelerate the time to production deployment of applications, enabling the Enterprise to quickly "reap" the benefits from high performance, high through-put, the ability to execute complex event processing by processing single or multiple events sources, with one or many data streams, and then to inevitably gain the associated resource benefits and financial reward. It is important to note, that these tools must not just be a "lightweight" façade, but be built on a solid, comprehensive, and Enterprise strength middleware base.

So is this all achievable? A challenge certainly, but now a new product family is about to be delivered for the industry, and thought by some, to stand-alone in a whole new category, "a flexible open systems solution domain".

Now this is yet to be seen, but these latest offerings from BEA, the WebLogic Event Server and WebLogic Real Time come "out of the gate" ready to address the real needs in this space, with benchmarking statistics arriving from the labs, showing a event/msg through-put and low latency values with the kind of numbers never thought possible with Java.

The new products become generally available worldwide on July 16, 2007, so please take some time to review the new Dev2Dev pages (coming soon), EDSOA information and then download the products for evaluation.

Here are some additional resources to get you started in the interim:

• An interview I gave: Building an Event-Driven SOA over on Arch2Arch
• Another interview by Guy Churchward: Event-Driven SOA
• A podcast on Trends in Virtualization and Event Driven Architectures
• My colleague Ruma Sanyal has just blogged about CEP Engine or Event Driven Application Server?

And lest I forget, watch this space for new Eclipse-based tooling and Monitoring dashboard value-add on features arriving very soon.

April 2008

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'Event Transforming' EDA, CEP Visualized Eclipse IDE Application Development

Equinox OSGi™, the 'Event-transformers' platform foundation

'Event-transformers' Turbo charge your Event Processing EDA solutions

Articles

Building your first WebLogic Event Server Application
In this tutorial, Robin Smith gives a brief introduction to WebLogic Event Server, and a step-by-step process for creating your first WebLogic Event Server application. Jul. 16, 2007

Interview Series: Building an Event-Driven SOA
In this interview, Robin Smith, senior engineering product manager, WebLogic Time- and Event-Driven Computing, is interviewed about the products and concepts architects need in order to build an event-driven SOA. Jul. 11, 2007

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