Section 1.7. Is ESA compatible with event-driven architecture?

1.7. Is ESA compatible with event-driven architecture?

Event-driven architecture (EDA) is another architectural paradigm that is often mentioned in conjunction with SOA. While EDA is fundamentally different from SOAs such as ESA, the two styles are not contradictory, and in fact, they work together well. ESA is a request/response architecture. Service consumers make requests of services and wait for responses. The idea of EDA is "fire and forget." Systems are constructed to respond to events that occur in software or in the real world. Once an event has occurred, a cascading process begins in reaction to the event. Perhaps alerts are sent to people, tasks are assigned, or automated responses are executed. EDA meets ESA in terms of this process of reacting to events. For example, if an event requires a task to be performed, users can use a composite application based on ESA to execute that task. In processing the task, more events can be raised, initiating more chains of events. SAP has long recognized the importance of events in modeling and automating business processes. More than 2,000 core events exist on business objects in the mySAP Business Suite. SAP has created a new infrastructure for turning these core events into business events that can be the foundation of a new generation of event-driven solutions. See Chapter 5 for an expanded discussion of SAP's plans for EDA.