2011 The year of the event

Todd Biske, on his excellent Blog has offereed the imperative, "Let's make 2011 the year of the event" That is a truly wonderful cause. I am shamelessly taking the idea and adding some of my own thinking here. I urge you to read Todd's original post, though.

I think we have had misgivings about eventing models since the early EAI days. With the advent of EAI we worked with events as integration mechanisms. Without attempting to do anything about the underlying systems, and without a sensible taxonomy.


Now perhaps as we think seriously about events and event models there are 2 big ideas that we need to consider.

The first is that when some business object changes state, it should let "the world" know. Think Business Object trigger - here's a link back to 2008 on that.

The second is situational awareness, Here we really need to have a proper mechanism for understanding the effects of an event across a rabge of "observers" might be. It becomes a question of responsibility. When multiple "observers" see the same event they may all choose to handle it. However they are likely to be inconsistent (not necessarily any harm in that), some might claim ignorance (you never told me that), some might have taken different action knowing how another observer behaved...

Using human communications and human triggered interactions as a model, we need to look at the "situational awareness" aspect and decide what to do about conflicts in understanding, conflicts in behavior