The SOA bandwagon got so crowded that some people are sponsoring a new entry: EDA. But are SOA and EDA really distinct? Or are we simply adding a layer of FUD over the SOA hype?
by Jason Bloomberg
June 15, 2004
hile service-oriented architecture (SOA) seems to be on everybody's lips these days, some vendors and analysts are proposing an alternative approach known as event-driven architecture (EDA). Some camps even go so far as to say that SOA and EDA are competitive, mutually exclusive concepts, and that enterprises have to choose between one or the other, casting fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) into the decision-making processes of IT architectural committees far and wide. Well, if you have some of this FUD yourself, you can relax. ZapThink believes that for all practical purposes, EDA is not truly a separate architectural approach, but is actually core to how companies should implement a proper SOA, and distinguishing EDA as a separate architectural approach is nothing more than a straw man.
What Is Event-Driven Architecture?
To its proponents, EDA is an approach where events trigger asynchronous messages that are then sent between independent software components that are completely unaware of each other--in other words, decoupled, autonomous objects. An event source typically sends messages through some middleware integration mechanism like a bus, and then the middleware publishes the messages to the objects that have subscribed to the events. The event itself encapsulates an activity and is a complete description of a specific action.
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Jason Bloomberg is a Senior Analyst at ZapThink, an industry analyst firm focused on Web services and service-oriented architectures. ZapThink will be hosting the conference ZapThinkTank: Building the SOA Team in San Francisco October 3-6, 2004. For more information, please visit http://www.zapthink.com/zapthinktank.html .
hile service-oriented architecture (SOA) seems to be on everybody's lips these days, some vendors and analysts are proposing an alternative approach known as event-driven architecture (EDA). Some camps even go so far as to say that SOA and EDA are competitive, mutually exclusive concepts, and that enterprises have to choose between one or the other, casting fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) into the decision-making processes of IT architectural committees far and wide. Well, if you have some of this FUD yourself, you can relax. ZapThink believes that for all practical purposes, EDA is not truly a separate architectural approach, but is actually core to how companies should implement a proper SOA, and distinguishing EDA as a separate architectural approach is nothing more than a straw man.
