Event-driven Architecture

Event-driven architecture (EDA) is a software architecture pattern promoting the production, detection, consumption of, and reaction to events.

An event can be defined as "a significant change in state". For example, when a consumer purchases a car, the car's state changes from "for sale" to "sold". A car dealer's system architecture may treat this state change as an event to be produced, published, detected and consumed by various applications within the architecture.

This architectural pattern may be applied by the design and implementation of applications and systems which transmit events among loosely coupled software components and services. An event-driven system typically consists of event emitters (or agents) and event consumers (or sinks). Sinks have the responsibility of applying a reaction as soon as an event is presented. The reaction might or might not be completely provided by the sink itself. For instance, the sink might just have the responsibility to filter, transform and forward the event to another component or it might provide a self-contained reaction to such event. The first category of sinks can be based upon traditional components such as message oriented middleware while the second category of sinks (self contained online reaction) might require a more appropriate transactional executive framework.

Building applications and systems around an event-driven architecture allows these applications and systems to be constructed in a manner that facilitates more responsiveness, because event-driven systems are, by design, more normalized to unpredictable and asynchronous environments.

Event-driven architecture can complement service-oriented architecture (SOA) because services can be activated by triggers fired on incoming events. This paradigm is particularly useful whenever the sink does not provide any self-contained executive.

SOA 2.0 evolves the implications SOA and EDA architectures provide to a richer, more robust level by leveraging previously unknown causal relationships to form a new event pattern. This new business intelligence pattern triggers further autonomous human or automated processing that adds exponential value to the enterprise by injecting value-added information into the recognized pattern which could not have been achieved previously.

Computing machinery and sensing devices (like sensors, actuators, controllers) can detect state changes of objects or conditions and create events which can then be processed by a service or system. Event triggers are conditions that result in the creation of an event.