Saturday, May 17, 2008

On Complexity and use of COTS



My daughter has returned yesterday from a trip abroad, and brought me a present - since she knows that I have a collection of teas, she brought me another tea, unfortunately she does not really understand much in teas, so what I got as a present is a laxative tea. Well - I thanked her, and wish that I'll not have the need to use it ever.
Catching up in blog-land, I found an interesting posting by Mark Tsimelzon from Coral8,
entitled "complexity scorecard", the direction of defining indications for complexity is useful, however, this can be taken a step further, since the different indications belong to various topics, some of them about the complexity of functionality, and some on different measurements of scale, high availability and interface type, which are orthogonal issues. The assumption in Mark's scorecard is that if one has enough indications that it is cost-effective to use COTS for event processing instead of hand-code it, however, in some cases it is not the aggregation, since some of these indications can justify COTS even if most others don't exist (e.g. complex functionality), and sometimes the boundaries are not that clear, thus, there is a need to further refine the question "when is it cost-effective to use COTS" ? - thus, while the thinking is in the right direction, a scorecard like this looks somewhat simplistic. Do I have a better one ? -- not really, but will join the chase after it... more - later.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

On Event Processing Networks - take one



Our BEA colleagues have once published an "Hello World" applications done with event processing network, since "Hello World" is the killer application of every programming paradigm -). Recently, a paper trying to define "Event Processing Networks" by Guy Sharon and myself, has been published in the on-line addition of IBM Systems Journal; anybody interested is welcome to read and comment. This is "take one", and we are still working on refining the terms, as well as looking on implementation and optimization issues in
heterogenous event processing networks - more later.




Sunday, May 11, 2008

EPTS - last call for founding members


This is a reminder - we are going to close soon the list of "founding members" for EPTS - the original call has been posted in this Blog six weeks ago as well as in some other places. I am glad to report that by now 50 members have joined - organizations: vendors, analysts and customers; individuals - academic people, analysts, customers and independent consultants. The list is going to be closed, anybody (organization or individual) that want to join the list of "founding members" that will be reported in a press release in early June. If you still want to join - please follow the instructions in the original posting.
Mark your calendar -- the annual F2F meeting of EPTS will take place in Stamford, CT - call for contribution will be published soon.