StreamBase Update
I have not looked at what StreamBase do for a while now. But as you might read in my previous blog entry I found some financial information about StreamBase and thought I’d take a quick look to see what they are up to. Or, what can you do with $48,000,000 USD?
A new idea they have is the component exchange. I like. This is something all infrastructure platforms need. A place where you can find plug-in components to your favorite tool. For example the Eclipse platform have thousands of plug-ins available on their marketplace.
So I really like the idea. But 18 components? That’s sadly not much of an exchange. It seems that there’s no third party components and StreamBase don’t seem to put much into their own exchange either. But still a good idea.
Another good place to check what’s going on is in the documentation section of the StreamBase site. They have good documentation and a quick check reveals that there are updates published with regular intervals. While browsing the "what’s new" section I smell Financial Markets all over the place. If I would be looking at this for the first time I would put this into the "tools for traders and other people on Wall St." category and not into the ‘generic CEP tool’
I did not bother to download, which I think you still can (a gold star to StreamBase for that) , as there were not enough interesting stuff to look at. Maybe I would be more excited if I were working in the capital markets.
Hello Marco,
I’m not sure if I commented on your blog before or not, so I’ll introduce myself. My name is Eddie Galvez, one of the founders and architects at StreamBase. Since the infancy of StreamBase (even before formal funding and public presence days) I have been working with a team of bright, smart and passionate people in building the best event processing platform we could build. Our roots, mostly from people in the area of (relational) database research (myself included), drive us to build a platform that any and all can use for any domain: a class-leading “generic CEP tool”.
What you are rightly observing, is simply that we have chosen to focus energy (think marketing & sales primarily, but even some of engineering) in a particular domain, so that we can best understand applications that our paying customers are building and deploying quickly and without ambiguity. The product features, while often designed with domain-specific use cases in mind, appear, insofar as feasible, always in a generic fashion.
In my vision, it should be clear that StreamBase is:
- a generic CEP platform, the best of its kind
- domain-specific “addons” that assist coming up to speed with, and being productive in, the platform for a given problem domain.
If you browse through our materials you should notice something called “Frameworks”. That is a large part of what these “addons” are in practice (adapters are a another big part, which is also what you see often in release notes), and that is where we slot things that “traders and other people on Wall St.” ask for. Our addons are even capable of customizing the user authoring experience where necessary (thank you Eclipse for enabling this with ease!), so we actually maintain a generic platform without sacrificing the user experience for domain-specific application developers.
If you haven’t tried StreamBase out in a while (ever?), to get a feel for how things are going in CEP-feature land, please do download it and I hope you will agree with my observations.
Sincerely,
Eddie
Eddie, welcome to my blog…
It was a couple of years ago I took StreamBase for a proper test drive. From what I see, from a purely technical viewpoint, your product is indeed a generic tool.
But when it is not perceived as one. It really does not matter. If viewed as a tool for the capital markets, it might not even being considered for other uses. Another problem is that most people I know don’t even consider looking at anything dealing with financial markets. They just assume that anything targeted at these guys is too expensive for other uses. Thus not an solution, even if technically suitable.
Also, looking at the capabilities of StreamBase, it is well suited for the kind of data stream processing that I assume is common among your Wall St. customers. For many other types of uses, you might need other types of CEP capabilities. Not that StreamBase can’t be used in these other domains. But is it the most natural choice? Perhaps not? It’s just the, one-size-does-not-fit-all in action, and basically says nothing about StreamBase as such. All tools can’t just solve all problems.
The number of problem domains in the field of CEP is so large so that I think we need at least a handful of product categories to solve all types of problems. In one of those categories, StreamBase is indeed rocking.
But as CEP is such a new field, we have yet to agree on these categories so I won’t go into them further..