Towards Effective Event-Driven SOA in Enterprise Systems

Event-driven programming is progressively replacing the call-stack model to improve flexibility, efficiency and scalability in SOA. Enterprise applications often deal with large messages attached to asynchronous events. This could reduce the benefits provided by event-driven programming since the need for having every information propagated as event is counterbalanced by wasting resources when large messages are entirely propagated to destinations that do not use all of them. In this paper, we propose the adoption of the D-WSLink framework for improving data transfers by using a composite and extensible declarative mechanism to inject the desired message transfer strategies into the underlying middleware. At the current stage, we focus mainly on (conditional) lazy transfer mechanisms even though the framework is able to support also smarter strategies. In particular, we compare, through an experimental analysis, our system with Apache Camel in delivering events with large attachments. The results show that the proposed approach is effective not only for programming but also at performance level.