An Event Processing System for Rule-Based Component Integration

The Integration Rules (IRules) project has developed an environment in which active rules, known as integration rules, are used together with transactions to provide an event-driven, rule-based approach to the integration of black-box components. This paper presents the event processing system that supports the use of integration rules over components. The event processing system is composed of the language framework for the specification of different types of events, an event generation system for generating event instances, and an event handler for communicating the occurrence of events to the integration rule processor. The language framework supports the enhancement of EJB components with events that are generated before and after the execution of methods on components. Since integration rules support an immediate coupling mode and execute in the context of nested transactions, a synchronization algorithm has been developed to coordinate the execution of immediate integration rules with the execution of methods on components. The synchronization algorithm makes it possible to suspend and resume distributed application transactions to accommodate the nested execution of integration rules with an immediate coupling mode.