Improving Business Agility with EDA Going beyond SOA, enterprises can gain even greater agility by implementing event-driven architectures (EDAs) that automatically detect and react to significant business events. However, EDA planning and deployment is complex, and even experienced SOA architects and developers need expert guidance. InEvent-Driven Architecture, four leading IT innovators present both the theory of EDA and practical, step-by-step guidance to implementing it successfully. The authors first establish a thorough and workable definition of EDA and explore how EDA can help solve many of todayrs"s most difficult business and IT challenges. Yours"ll learn how EDAs work, what they can do today, and what they might be able to do as they mature. Yours"ll learn how to determine whether an EDA approach makes sense in your environment and how to overcome the difficult interoperability and integration issues associated with successful deployment. Finally, the authors present chapter-length case studies demonstrating how both full and partial EDA implementations can deliver exceptional business value. Coverage includes How SOA and Web services can power event-driven architectures The role of SOA infrastructure, governance, and security in EDA environments EDA core components: event consumers and producers, message backbones, Web service transport, and more EDA patterns, including simple event processing, event stream processing, and complex event processing Designing flexible stateless events that can respond to unpredictable customers, suppliers, and business partners Addressing technical and business challenges such as project management and communication EDA at work: real-world applications across multiple verticals Hugh Tayloris a social software evangelist for IBM Lotus Software. He coauthoredUnderstanding Enterprise SOAand has written extensively on Web services and SOA. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.Angela Yochemis an executive in a multinational technology company and is a recognized thought leader in architecture and large-scale technology management.Les Phillips, VP, enterprise architecture, at SunTrust Banks Inc., is responsible for defining the strategic and business IT foundation for many areas of the enterprise.Frank Martinez, EVP, product strategy, at SOA Software, is a recognized expert on distributed, enterprise application, and infrastructure platforms. He has served as senior operating executive for several venture-backed firms and helped build Intershop Communications into a multibillion-dollar public company. Foreword xi Preface xii Introduction 1 Event-Driven Architecture: A Working Definition 1 The "New" Era of Interoperability Dawns 6 The ETA for Your EDA 9 Endnotes 9 PART I THE THEORY OF EDA Chapter 1 EDA: Opportunities and Obstacles 13 The Vortex 13

Hugh Taylor is a social software evangelist for IBM Lotus Software. He coauthored Understanding Enterprise SOA and has written extensively on Web services and SOA. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Angela Yochem is an executive in a multinational technology company and is a recognized thought leader in architecture and large-scale technology management. Les Phillips, VP, enterprise architecture, at SunTrust Banks Inc., is responsible for defining the strategic and business IT foundation for many areas of the enterprise. Frank Martinez, EVP, product strategy, at SOA Software, is a recognized expert on distributed, enterprise application, and infrastructure platforms. He has served as senior operating executive for several venture-backed firms and helped build Intershop Communications into a multibillion-dollar public company.

Preface Preface About This BookAs professionals in the enterprise architecture field, we have observed the recent and spectacular rise of the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) with excitement tempered by concern. The new standards-based architectural paradigm promises great advances in interoperability amongst previously incompatible software applications. In turn, it has the potential to deliver gains in agility and IT cost control. Perhaps most exciting, though, is the potential for SOA to make possible the realization of Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), an approach to enterprise architecture that yields a high level of agility by increasing systems' awareness and intelligent responses to relevant events.At the same time, it became clear to us that the steps required to design and deploy an EDA, or an SOA, its master set of architectural characteristics, were far from obvious. Even going beyond the fact that the technology and standards are immature and thus challenging, the practice of , uniting software with an overarching standards-based approach that extends outside the enterprise is a new field, lacking in many of the guiding principles of infrastructure, governance, and best practices that hold together most traditional forms of architecture and development.For better or worse, some software vendors are now bringing what they call EDA suites to market. However, the commercial offerings in EDA tend to be quite narrowly defined and vendor-centric. As such, they are inadequate on their own to offer much in the way of instruction on the overall best practices required for EDA.We perceive a need amongst architects for a book that combines both the theory of EDA - the grand vision that lead to its formation and the essential nature of the paradigm with a practical look at building an EDA over an SOA implementation in the real world. This book is neither all theory nor all practice. It is a blend, with the idea that true success with EDA depends on a good understanding of both aspects of the paradigm.To understand how this book is set up and what it contains, we thought it would make sense first to take a quick look at the definition, history, and context of EDA and SOA. These two related architectural styles are not as new as they seem, though recent developments in standards have lead to breakthroughs in their potential realization. Inside This Book: The Path to EDAEven for a lot of experienced architects and developers, the implicit connection between EDA and SOA has not been intuitively obvious. A lot of IT pros react to SOA with a sentiment akin to, "That's really cool. Now what?" These questions are completely legitimate. Imagine someone handing you a violin and declaring, "Oh, good, now I get to hear Mozart." That person is making several assumptions, including that you know what the violin is, how to play it and how to play Mozart in particular. In many IT situations, it is not always evident how loose coupling and a service-orientation will take you to an EDA. If your boss drops a VisualStudio.Net pack on your desk and says, "Now you will deliver an EDA," you may not necessarily know how to get from here to there. That is purpose of this book.Much of this book is dedicated to helping you understand where the rubber meets the road in turning the vision of EDA into a reality. In so doing, we will delve into detail on the subject of SOA