Gregor’s Ramblings on Events - Enterprise Integration Patterns

This blog chronicles my journey with asynchronous and distributed system design over two decades. These are my Ramblings related to Events [See all Ramblings]. Subscribe to my ramblings via RSS.

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Queues are key elements of any asynchronous system because they can invert control flow. Their ability to re-shape traffic enables high-throughput systems that behave gracefully under heavy load. But all that magic doesn't come for free: to function well, queues require flow control Read more »

Event-driven architectures (EDAs) are frequently pitched as loosely coupled, when compared to other forms of integration. Coupling is a multi-faceted and nuanced property, so as architects we should have a closer look. Read more »

Coupling is integration's magic word. Despite entire books being written on the subject, it's still widely recited as a "loose coupling is good" mantra. Coupling deserves better, so let's clarify the dimensions and nuances of coupling. Read more »

OOP is one of the conferences that originated in the "OO" era of the early to mid-nineties. While most of these events have shed the double "O" -- OOPSLA has become SPLASH and JAOO has become GOTO, OOP stayed true to its name and remains one of the premier German developer conferences. This year OOP celebrated its 25th anniversary. Here are my impressions. Read more »

I have not blogged about events in a while, but SATURN 2015 has been an amazing event that's well worth rambling about. Read more »

I joined JavaOne this year as a panelist on Cloud Computing. Here my belated impressions on this year's JavaOne. Read more »

I guess I am the last person to blog about Google I/O. By now, everyone should have read about Wave and the free Android phone (with 30 day SIM!). I am just now getting to write this up on my flight back to Japan, so I’ll give you my personal impressions and viewpoints, if you are still interested. Read more »

Since Google's Developer Day, I have been promising to speak more regularly about Google products. This is a bit of a balancing act for me, as I want to avoid the slippery slope of becoming a corporate sock puppet. I also don't want to neglect my interest in connected systems, SOA, and asynchronous messaging. With the Internet turning into the largest connected system, the gap between Web-based technologies and connected systems design has become significantly smaller, allowing me to combine interests and Google developer products more naturally. Of course, the fact that Google is rolling out new developer products and APIs around the clock, does not hurt either. Read more »

I am just returning from a trip to Montreal and Keystone, CO for the OOPSLA and Colorado Software Summit conferences. I spoke on SOA Patterns, workshopped my conversation pattern paper, and gave six talks on event-driven architectures and building mashups using Yahoo! Pipes and Google Mashup Editor. Phew! Read more »

What’s wrong with this picture? I crash a stylish party at a pricey venue (SF Moma). I have no business being there, nor do I have the required invitation. I nonchalantly talk my way in, and hit the crowd with two fellow geeks. Within a few seconds an attractive blonde with a low cut dress approaches us and engages us in a conversation. We grab a few free drinks, indulge on the tirelessly circulating horse d’oeuvres, and talk to the blonde. Read more »

I attended the Enterprise Mashup Summit last Friday. It was a small-ish event, with about 50 people attending. We saw about 10 presentations, mostly by vendors plus an open forum. None of the presentations were too sales-ey, which gave the event a nice workshop feel. Given the limited size, it would have been nice to have more time for interaction. Here is a quick rundown of my impressions. Read more »

The Internet is cruel. So you finally made the leap from EAI stone age to become a hip mashup developer. Now it turns out you are once again behind the curve, Unless you've written your won Facebook app and scored a million or so installs you are just a worm in the dust of the global data superhighway. Join the club. Read more »

I attended the first day of Mashup Camp today. The event took place at the Computer History Museum, which is actually walking distance from my office. Ironically, the only day in the year when something actually happens within walking distance in Silicon Valley it had to rain. Oh well. Read more »

Two weeks ago I presented a keynote at the DEBS (Distributed Event-based Systems) conference. The emphasis of the conference was on academic work in the field but event-based systems are rapidly gaining traction in commercial applications as CEP (Complex Event Processing) is becoming a household name like SOA (equally difficult to pin down). All this talk about events reminded me that applications on the Web are becoming increasingly event driven. Read more »

Last week Google held a developer day in 10 cities around the world. Here are my take-aways. Read more »

JavaOne is one of the few geek conferences that take place in San Francisco. The content can be hit or miss but the proximity and the good parties always make it worth stopping by. I also had to fulfil my duty to recruit the last smart software engineer in the Bay Area to Google. Read more »

Even though I have been working for the (self-declared) non-evil empire for a while now, I still have a lot of ties to the Microsoft community, even beyond drinking Weissbier with Christian Weyer. I am particularly proud that I have been able to maintain my MVP status, Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional award. Here my (brief) report from the MVP Summit in Seattle & Redmond. Read more »

I am just riding the train back from Aarhus (the second largest city in Denmark in case your geography skills are as weak as mine were before my first trip here) to Copenhagen. Many speakers consistently rave about JAOO. The speaker roster, the logistics, the attendees - everything just seems to be very high quality and run very smoothly. This year I was nominated to be track host for the SOA track entitled "SOA - What's Left to Say?" Read more »

This year I got to go to fooCamp! What is fooCamp? It is sort of like Burning Man for techno geeks. But just as Burning Man has gone pretty high tech fooCampers started to have more fun by burning things. It's difficult to put the experience into words... Read more »

I just returned from a trip to Germany to attend a workshop on The Role of Business Processes in Service Oriented Architecture. Besides a guaranteed top score in buzzword bingo the workshop provided a unique opportunity to connect thought leaders from academia and industry over the course of a week. The attendee roster sported the usual industry heavyweights, i.e., Microsoft, IBM, SAP, making me proud to add Google to the list. Read more »

Remember the people from high school who had strange hobbies and could never get a date? Well, they all grew up and they are running a conference now, the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications conference, OOPSLA in short. While the conference logistics can be quirky at times, the content is top notch. And it seems like most of them have managed to get a date after all. Read more »

(Professional) life can be a little ironic sometimes. Now that I work for Google I was able to go to Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference aka PDC for the first time. It was actually very nice to be able to stay in touch with the "other side". Read more »

Two weeks ago I attended a very small, but special conference on enterprise software development. Here is what I came away with.. Read more »

I just returned from Microsoft TechEd Europe in Amsterdam. I was lucky enough to present on event-driven architectures in front of almost 600 people. Since multiple people asked me for the source files, I figured I'd post a quick summary of the talk, including the source files. Read more »

This year I actually missed putting in a proposal for TechEd. However, that has not kept me from actually presenting :-) So I am here fighting the Orlando Summer humidity together with 11000 other geeks and am actually having a good time. Read more »

It seems like I spend all my time at conferences. I am speaking at the Patterns and Practices Summit and SD West this week. This one is setup by Keith Pleas in close collaboration with the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft. So yes, I am still promiscuous when it comes to platforms. But it makes me feel better that Ted Neward seems to beat me in that category, though. Read more »

A number of people have already about the TSSS but that can't stop me from occupying my fair share of the cyberspace with my impressions. Read more »

OK, so I am officially the slowest blogger on the 'Net... last week I attended two conferences, the BTW in Karlsruhe, Germany and TheServerSide Symposium in Las Vegas. Too bad they are over 6000 miles apart :-( Read more »

I just attended the conference in Toronto (I thought a 1/2 day tutorial in integration patterns). This conference is more of an academic events when compared to some of the purely commercial conferences like JavaOne. It was interesting to see what academia are working on these days in the areas of middleware and SOA. Read more »

For a change I spoke at a conference without traveling halfway around the world. At over 15,000 attendees, JavaOne is one of the largest developer conferences. Unfortunately, the signal-to-noise ratio is not always all that great, but it is still a good place to meet old and new friends. This year's conference was littered with talk and demos on SOA, ESB, Web Services, orchestration etc. Here my impressions... Read more »