ESB CEP support for multiple event streams

CEP applications often are designed to correlate messages from multiple event streams. A common example (used often the Drools CEP presentations and documentation) is a Online Trading System, which has a "Home Broker Stream" and a "Stock Trader Stream".

An Enterprise Service Bus such as JBoss ESB can provide a good architecture to support this type of CEP application. The developer could create three ESB Serivces. The first would create the Drool stateful knowledge session (and somehow publish this object to make it available for the other services), insert static facts, and call fireUntilHalt. The second service would represent the Home Broker Stream. It would receive trade requests from the Home Broker (say via a SOAP message), transform the XML into Java BuyOrderEvent objects, and insert these events into the stateful knowledge session via the Home Broker Stream entry point. The third service would be similar to the second service, except that it would handle messages from the Stock Trader, which for the sake of this example, come in as XML via a JMS transport, get transformed into Java BuyAckEvent objects and inserted into the session via the Stock Trader Stream entry point.

The rationale for having multiple services is to be able to handle different protocols and perform different transformations.