Modern event processing is fast becoming a foundation of today’s information society. This is a technology that emerged in the late 1990s, but event processing is nothing new. For sixty years it has been, and still is, a technological basis for discrete event simulation, weather simulation and forecasting, networks and the internet, and all manner of information gathering and communications—just to name a few areas. In the 1990s, there were one or two university research projects dedicated to developing new principles of event processing, called complex event processing (CEP). After 2000, CEP began to appear in commercial IT applications, and more recently, starting around 2006, the number of event processing applications and products in the marketplace has grown rapidly.

The Power of Events, a book that I published in 2002, was about this new area of event processing theory and applications and it offered a vision for an embryonic industry. Much has happened since then. Companies have been developing and marketing event processing products ever more rapidly. Indeed, complex event processing has become an established market area for commercial applications. University courses have sprung up around the world. It is now a developing area of computer science. It is time for more books on event processing!

This new book, Event Processing in Action, by Opher Etzion and Peter Niblett, is a very welcome contribution to the field. Both authors are prominent contributors to event processing and the first author is the founder of the internationally active Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS).

This is a book on the technology underlying event processing, and can be used by software professionals who wish to learn the event processing perspectives as well as serve as a basis for a university course on the subject. It deals with foundational matters such as what an event is, types of events, and different types of event processing agents. The book emphasizes distributed event processing, event-driven architectures, communicating networks of event processing agents, and how to build them. There are detailed examples throughout. It covers all the topics needed to bring the reader to a point where he or she can start building useful event processing software. The book takes a modern object-oriented approach to software throughout, so the reader should indeed be a software specialist.

The principles and technology in this book form one of the cornerstones needed to build the next generation of information technology and mobile applications based on event processing. Of course, commercial applications are often developed without the underlying technical principles being explicitly stated or studied. The principles come later! I believe this book will set the record straight. If you are at all interested in a systematic approach to both present and future distributed information processing and mobile applications, this is a book you should read.

David Luckham
Author of The Power of Events