Chapter 12. Features of JBoss BRMS Complex Event Processing

12.1. Events

Events are a record of significant change of state in the application domain. From a complex event processing perspective, an event is a special type of fact or object. A fact is a known piece of data. For instance, a fact could be a stock's opening price. A rule is a definition of how to react to the data. For instance, if a stock price reaches $X, sell the stock.
The defining characteristics of events are the following:
Events are immutable
An event is a record of change which has occurred at some time in the past, and as such it cannot be changed.

Note

The rules engine does not enforce immutability on the Java objects representing events; this makes event data enrichment possible.
The application should be able to populate un-populated event attributes, which can be used to enrich the event with inferred data; however, event attributes that have already been populated should not be changed.
Events have strong temporal constraints
Rules involving events usually require the correlation of multiple events that occur at different points in time relative to each other.
Events have managed life-cycles
Because events are immutable and have temporal constraints, they are usually only of interest for a specified period of time. This means the engine can automatically manage the life-cycle of events.
Events can use sliding windows
It is possible to define and use sliding windows with events since all events have timestamps associated with them. Therefore, sliding windows allow the creation of rules on aggregations of values over a time period.
Events can be declared as either interval-based events or point-in-time events. Interval-based events have a duration time and persist in working memory until their duration time has lapsed. Point-in-time events have no duration and can be thought of as interval-based events with a duration of zero.
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