Event Processing in Action

Chapter 3. Defining the events

When I can’t handle events, I let them handle themselves.

Henry Ford

Before delving into how events are processed, we spend a chapter discussing what events are and how they are defined. This is a good place to start our in-depth exploration of event processing, as it’s natural to begin the detailed design of an application by defining the event types that it uses. It’s good practice to base the design of an event processing application on a clearly thought-out set of event types. It also gives your first opportunity to see definition elements in use.

In this chapter we discuss the following topics:

• The logical structure of an event, and what we mean by an event type
• What you specify in an event type definition ...