June is a big month for CEP product releases, and the past few weeks have been no exception: Aleri
announced version 3, Apama announced version 4, and StreamBase announced version 6.0. Unsurprisingly, all these announcements contain proclamations of leadership. Aleri's headline claimed a better look and feel, and Apama announced integrated sample applications and unsubstantiated performance claims. By contrast, I think StreamBase announced an important breakthrough: the first visual debugger, profiler, and unit testing environment in the industry.
One of the main reasons I chose to join StreamBase is that in my time in the CEP industry, I've heard from customers, prospects, and industry insiders that the technology is simply superb: it's fast, it's open, it's scalable (multi-threaded), and it has adopted a language metaphor (SQL) that is standards-based and familiar to most developers. The visual environment uniquely enables business users and IT alike.
I think release 6.0 extends that lead. The ability to debug, test, and profile event processing applications is absolutely critical to ensure fast, reliable, and managable deployment in large enterprises, as well as adoption by smaller firms that need to do more with less.
The release contains the following:
- StreamBase Visual Debugger - One of the hidden problems with some CEP platforms is that the visual tools were added as an afterthought, and, as a result, they generate code that's impossible to test, support and debug. This is not the case with StreamBase, that started with a visual development tool from the very core, which has made it an incredibly powerful, integrated platform on which to debug and analyze applications, because there is no code generation - what you see is what you get and it's what you debug.
- Profiling - Profiling provides the ability to test, profile, and provision software and hardware resources associated with a CEP applications. Once again, with StreamBase profiling, you profile and optimize the actual code you designed, so the result is a better, faster, more reliable application.
- Unit Testing - As the CEP market matures, larger and larger development groups are involved in CEP application development, which motivates the need for more sophisticated group development capability to test applications. StreamBase Unit Testing allows teams to work in parallel, and allows teams to reduce application errors during development. Unit testing also enables business developers to more fully participate in application development by providing IT the ability to test code supplied by business analysts before putting it into production,
The release of these features further demonstrates that CEP platforms are coming of age and ready for enterprise adoption and large, group development. Yes these platforms are mature - today.