TIBCO Developers Library What is TIBCO BusinessEvents?

What businesses need today is something that will perceive and identify various diverse events that occur within and across the organization, which may result a nd lead to a significant condition, problem, or opportunity that requires an imm ediate response or human intervention. These events may occur in a specific patt ern or trend and may result to a specific outcome that could likely make an impa ct to the company either in a positive or a negative way. TIBCO BusinessEvents i s a leading software in complex event processing that addresses the concern of r esponding to certain conditions or situations before they occur by processing or executing predefined rules. In this document, you will learn more about how TIB CO BusinessEvents can be beneficial to many users like I.T. and TIBCO consultant s, software architects and even CIOs with focus on its features and advantages, and how easily you can define and make use of its resources. What is Complex Event Processing? Complex Event Processing is an event processing technology that processes events uninterruptedly. It is different from other event processing technologies becau se it treats all events as potentially significant and aims to identify meaningf ul events within the event cloud. It employs techniques such as detection of com plex patterns of many events, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchi es, and relationships between events. You can use the data gathered by your car sensors, for example, to generate certain types of events. These car sensors mea sure the change in pressure of tires over time. If it detects that there is a dr amatic drop in tire pressure within a small amount of time, it may send out a los sOfTirePressure event, notify the driver about the situation, and respond by slow ing down the car. You can see that before the car experiences a flat tire, the s ystem sends out a notification; thus, the problem that is likely to occur is pre vented from happening. TIBCO BusinessEvents is a software that specializes in Co mplex Event Processing. It analyzes the cause and impact of different meaningful events and how to respond to those that may be considered as a potential harm o r benefit. It also works on correlating massive amount of data about many events and applying specific rules to identify situations that require a response. Bus inessEvents is proactive , which means that it responds before problems arise and o pportunities come; thereby, eliminating possible complications that may happen a nd grabbing the chance or opportunity to gain leverage in business. What are the different aspects of Complex Event Processing? One aspect is about knowing the state of persons, objects, or entities in your b usiness. It is monitoring of certain events and observation of certain performan ce indicators or criteria. Another aspect is about detecting significant facts a bout persons, objects, or entities in your business and responding to specific c onditions that occur. The last is about tracking information over a period of ti me and tracing pertinent data that may result to a problem or an opportunity. BusinessEvents enables CEP problems to be solved through a model-driven approach . What are these various models? These models are the Event model, Concept model, Rule and Ruleset model, Rule Fu nctions, and State model. The event model provides inputs into BusinessEvents th rough the event properties and optionally their XML payload. The Concept model r efers to data concepts mapped from events properties or payload, or other means into BusinessEvents. Rules provide the behavioral mechanisms in BusinessEvents a nd are composed of the declarations, optional conditions, and actions. Rulesets serve as containers of related rules. Rule functions refer to algorithms, proced ures, or functions, which have arguments and a body. They are reusable component s in BusinessEvents projects. State model refers to some state machine or state model representation, which describes the states that an entity can hold, the tr ansitions allowed between the states and the conditions for such transitions.

What are channels and destinations? Channels represent a physical connection to a resource such as Rendezvous daemon or Java Message Service. Destinations are contained in only one channel and rep resent listeners to messages from that resource, and they can also send messages to that resource. What are the types of channels? There are three types of channels: TIBCO Rendezvous channels, JMS Channels, and Local channels. TIBCO Rendezvous channels use the Rendezvous daemon as a connect ion resource while the JMS Channels use the JMS as a connection resource. Local channels are used to route events to multiple rule sessions. Rule sessions refer to an instance of the BusinessEvents engine. What is the difference between serializers and deserializers? Serializers are used by BusinessEvents to convert events to messages while deser ializers are used by BusinessEvents to convert messages to events. What are the three sorts of event that BusinessEvents supports? The three types of events supported are the simple event, time event, and adviso ry event. When called event, this refers to a simple event which defines an obje ct that represents an activity such as debiting an account, logging an employee, or suspending a fraud account. You can define the properties of simple events. Time events are timers that are used to trigger rules. There are two types: the repeating time event which repeats every specified interval and the rule-based t ime event which is asserted into working memory after a specified period of time . Rule-based event can be done by using the ontology function provided in Busine ssEvents. Lastly, the advisory event is an event asserted into working memory wh en certain condition occurs such as exceptions or errors, the failure of the Bus inessEvents engine to invoke or call a BusinessWorks process, and the success co ndition of engine startup or activation. You do not have to create or configure an event of advisory type because it is automatically available for use in the r esource list when you add a resource to the declaration portion of a rule. What are concepts? Concepts are descriptive entities similar to object oriented concept of a class. They describe a set of properties. For example, an Employee concept can have pr operties such as FirstName, LastName, Salary, and Department. Concepts have prop erty history and you can set the history size to a number of values with their t imestamp, which you want to keep in working memory or a persistent storage. Hist ory policies can either be Changes only, which means values will be stored only when they are modified or changed, or All Values, which means values will be sto red all the time even though they are not modified or changed. Concepts can also have inheritance, containment, and reference relationships. What are database concepts? Database concepts are BusinessEvents concepts created by mapping tables or views from a database. Each row in a table represents one database concept instance, and each column represents the properties of the database concept. Database conc epts are different from BusinessEvents concepts because you can perform database operations such as query, insert, update and delete. What is a scorecard?

A scorecard is a special type of concept that serves as static variables availab le throughout the BusinessEvents project. Scorecards are used to track certain k ey factors. Unlike a BusinessEvent concept, a scorecard is itself a single insta nce and not a description for creating instances. It is created during design-ti me. Rules are used to view and update the values of the properties in a scorecar d. What is a rule? What comprises a rule? Rules provide the behavioral mechanisms in BusinessEvents. A rule is composed of the declaration of entity types such as events or concepts, optionally one or m ore conditions, and an action. The action is executed by BusinessEvents when all of the conditions evaluate to true or there are no condition specified. Busines sEvents rules are declarative rather than procedural. This means that there is n o definite execution of these rules but you can specify a rule priority to deter mine which rule or rules are executed first when certain condition occurs. The r ule priority is a number from 1 to 10 with 1 as the highest priority and 10 as t he lowest priority. The default value is 5. When you leave the rule priority to a default value, this means that the BusinessEvents will be the one to choose or decide which rule will be executed when certain condition occurs. Rules are con tained within a ruleset which serves as a container of related rules. What is a state modeler? State modeler is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) compliant application that al lows you to model the lifecycle of an instance. For each instance of a given con cept, you can define which states it can have and how it will change from state to state based on applicable rules. A state model begins with a start state and ends with one or more end states. It is similar to a finite state automaton. In between may be simple, composite and concurrent states connected by transitions. A simple state is a state that has an entry and an exit action. A composite sta te is like a group of nested folders that contain other states. A concurrent sta te allows multiple state flows to be passed on. Transitions determine when an in stance of a concept passes from one state to another which is indicated by compl ex transitions, or from a state to itself which is indicated by self-transitions . What is a rule function? A rule function is an algorithm or method you write in BusinessEvents language f or use in the entire project. A rule function is composed of arguments and a bod y. It can return a value, for example, integer, String, or boolean data type. It can also return void or no value. Rule functions can be used as event preproces sors and can be executed during engine startup or shutdown. What is an event preprocessor? An event preprocessor is a rule function with one argument of type simple event. It performs actions after an incoming message is converted into a simple event but before it is asserted into working memory. This means that before a rule can process the simple event, the event preprocessor executes certain tasks first. What is a virtual rule function? A virtual rule function is a rule function that has arguments but no body. Its i mplementation is provided in the Decision Manager Business User Interface. The i mplementations are called decision table classes or external classes since they exist outside the BusinessEvents engine. Each row in a decision table forms a si mple rule and collectively defines the body of the virtual rule function.

What is Decision Manager, its use, and importance? Decision Manager is a component of BusinessEvents. It is an Eclipse-based platfo rm. Its friendly user interface allows a non-technical user to write, test, and deploy business rules to the BusinessEvents engine. Users who do not know progra mming or TIBCO BusinessEvents can participate in the formulation of rules and ru le functions and make their logic become part of the overall BusinessEvents proj ect. It is a client application to Rules Management Server and is supported only in Windows platform. What is a Rule Management Server? A Rule Management Server (RMS) is another component of BusinessEvents, which man ages decision projects and provides a mechanism for approval. It also provides u ser authentication, decision project authorization, and other project management features. Decision Manager communicates with Rules Management Server to check o ut decision projects, update local copies of decision tables, and commit changes . RMS users can then approve or reject those changes. What is nice in RMS is tha t it can be accessed remotely through a router or the Internet, which means that it does not have to be installed on the user s machine. Describe how an RMS project is created and used by Decision Manager users. The BusinessEvents project is created by the user. He creates events, concepts, rules, and rule functions. The project must contain at least one virtual rule fu nction. The EAR file for this project is built and the RMS user sets up an RMS p roject for it. The RMS user creates access control files which define the approp riate personnel that can access the decision project, domain model files which d efine what ontology resources the business user is allowed to utilize, and other s such as test files that contain data to test the decision table. After that, the RMS user starts the RMS server and informs the business user tha t it is already running. The business user logs into Decision Manager and reques ts for a decision project by checking it out and saving it to his local computer . The business user creates one or more decision tables locally with a locally r unning BusinessEvents engine started by Decision Manager automatically. The busi ness user commits the decision project for approval. The RMS user receives the r equest, reviews the project, and then approves or reject it. If he approves it, the RMS generates class files in a known location on a production BusinessEvents engine or he can manually save it there. The class files are either hot deploye d to a running system or deployed when the BusinessEvents system starts up. Afte r this, the business logic defined by the business user is now part of the Busin essEvents application. With TIBCO BusinessEvents, you can identify significant events and information o ver time within your organization. You can analyze the most likely impact of the se events to your business and prevent the occurrence of problems and grab every opportunity that comes to your business. This prediction capability of TIBCO Bu sinessEvents makes it truly one of a kind and the leading software when it comes to complex event processing. It also incorporates business users to formulate r ules based on their own expertise and integrate these rules in TIBCO BusinessEve nts. It is a fantastic way to collaborate in building projects and this results to higher throughput, efficiency, and leverage in business. NOTE: This article was written by one of the TIBCO Certified Professionals of Xm arter, Inc., a technology consulting firm that specializes in delivering busines s solutions using TIBCO technology. To schedule a technical interview with the c onsultants, send an email to info@xmarter.com.