Will Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) succeed SOA?

Oracle has announced availability of what it claims to be industry’s first integrated, standards-based product offering to help organizations build, deploy and manage event-driven applications, based on an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). You already have reports from the likes of Gartner talking about EDA. So EDA like SOA seems to have the potential to catch on as a buzzword and soon be hailed as the next big thing. As with all succesful buzzwords, although they might not make any difference to the way you work, its important to be aware of what they mean.

Wikipedia defines EDA as “Event Driven Architecture is a software architecture that allows a software developer to engineer and design modular software systems that sense and respond to business events.”

If we look at Oracle’s EDA Suite, it consists of the following products:
— Oracle Business Activity Monitoring — defines and analyzes event and
event patterns;
— Oracle Enterprise Service Bus — routes and distributes events between
applications with no coding required;
— Oracle Sensor Edge Server — captures, filters and manages events from
physical sensors and automation equipment, including RFID;
— Oracle Enterprise Messaging — delivers event messages reliably with
configurable qualities-of-service; and
— Oracle Business Rules — provides more flexible event routing and
distribution via a high performance rules engine.

Companies in a broad range of industries can use Oracle EDA Suite to become a real-time enterprise by enabling them to build, deploy and manage EDAs.

A ComputerWorld story dated May 2003 says “Four years from now, “mere mortals” will begin to adopt an event-driven architecture (EDA) for the sort of complex event processing that has been attempted only by software gurus building operating systems or systems management tools, and sophisticated developers at financial institutions, predicted Roy Schulte, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner”. So its almost time for EDA.

Like with SOA, event-driven doesn’t seem like a great ‘new’ idea but you never know how it will evolve and maybe take on new uses and meanings.

Reference:
* Oracle EDA Suite
* WebMethods’ comparison of EDA and SOA
* JavaWorld article on Event-driven services in SOA

Related:
* Understanding Enterprise SOA
* SOA What???
* Understanding Web Services and SOA