Hello Tony, and list members,

I listen, everyday, about the use of middleware to connect clients to
servers, interface to databases, connect shared resources. Recently I was
reviewing some research from a friend of mine, Richard Pawson, who leads the
CSC Foundations Research Group, and came across this paragraph.

Richard writes: "Instead of having programs that run periodically, and
execute a pre-determined process (branching and looping when appropriate),
the system is divided into independent chunks of code that fire or trigger
immediately in response to specific events  -  which may be externally
sensed, or internally generated.  One obvious advantage for these type of
systems is speed of response; another is parallelism  -  responding to
multiple events (of the same, or different kinds) in parallel.  The
resulting design can be simpler, because it does not require all the
possible combinations and sequences of incoming events to be specified, as
would be required in a conventional programming approach."

During IPROF's VPLUS SIG, we were debating the Event based vs. Procedural
based paradigm. After reading the above paragraph, I just couldn't resist
sharing it. The biggest issue driving the demand for looser coupling is
business agility:  the recognition that a system that is optimized to
today's requirements may be very difficult to adapt to future needs.  Rather
than trying to eliminate the joints between systems, we should be
consciously trying to build in more joints, so that the pieces can be more
easily separated and re-formed in future.

Cheers,

Jonathan van den Berg
Premier Software Technologies
fon: 408-257-8757
fax: 408-253-1184
www: www.premiersoft.com