CHAPTER 2
Sixty Years of Event Processing
Event processing technologies over the past sixty years up to today and likely developments in the future:
- Discrete event simulation
- Networks
- Active databases
- Middleware, SOA, and the enterprise service bus
- Event driven architectures
Event processing in one form or another is not new. It has been going on for the past sixty years or more. If we look at the history of event processing, we can see a natural development from the use of events in earlier applications to the twenty-first-century uses of events in communications, information processing, and enterprise management. History gives us a perspective on the origins of Complex Event Processing (CEP) and how the CEP techniques evolved and will evolve in the future.
This chapter gives a brief review on how event processing has been a basis for developing various technologies over the past sixty years. These developments happened very rapidly, one after the other, and they are all established technologies today—big business, as it happens! Chapters 5 and 9 describe a longer-term view of future developments in event processing.
Four technology movements have arisen during the past sixty years, all of them based upon processing different types of events and for very different purposes. They are Discrete Event Simulation, Networks, Databases (among which Active Databases made explicit use of event processing in their design), and the Middleware movement—which includes many developments ...
