BEA Leaps Into Complex Event Processing

“The WebLogic Event Server is a lightweight application server with event features built-in, which eliminates the need for third-party CEP engines,” says Guy Chuchward, vice president of WebLogic products with BEA Systems.

Most front-office applications are written in C or C++ because regular Java is not fast enough to handle the data streams, explains Churchward. “With C or C++ you are dealing with about 50,000 complex instructions per second and with Java, if you write a real-time Java spec, you’re talking about 10,000 complex instructions per second—it’s not fast enough,” he says.

By using the latest release of WLRT, Java applications will be able to handle 50,000 complex instructions while also handling 10,000 rules against those instructions, says Churchward. “What we did was provide predictability against Java,” he adds. “Anyone can dump a Java application on top of WLRT and it will allow them to have a deterministic environment.”

BEA Systems has also reduced the maximum worst-case pause time for real-time Java applications from 30 milliseconds in version 1.0 down to 10 milliseconds in the planned release, says Churchward. “The average pause time is now less than 1 millisecond,” he adds.

The new release also comes with a latency analysis tool, which allows Java developers to tune sources of latency in their real-time applications, say vendor officials.

“We found it useful to have tooling for tuning in both the development and runtime environments,” says Churchward. The tool does not affect an application’s performance, so it can be used in the development processes as well as production, he adds.

Rob Daly