Foreword

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!