Today StreamBase hosted an online roundtable entitled

"How to Empower Your Development Team with CEP and

Visual Programming" featuring developers from J.P.

Morgan, GAIN Capital, and Datasports. Combined, the panelists

have 35+ years of development experience, and years of CEP

experience, and they were kind enough to share those experiences

with us, discussing the adoption of CEP technology, developing

applications with CEP, and the best practices they've learned

along the way.

For developers, development

managers, architects, and business stakeholders this roundtable

tells an interesting story about how CEP technology can truly

transform the role of the developer. Take a look at some of the

highlights below, href="http://www.streambase.com/news-and-events/webinars/cep-developer-roundtable/"

target="_blank" title="Watch the replay">watch the

replay, then comment below and tell us about your

experiences with CEP.

Talk about your experience with

CEP

Phil Martin, Datasports: I

like using StreamBase because I like tools that let the computers

do stuff that the computers are good at, and let me do stuff that

requires thought. As a developer, you wind up doing some tasks

over and over again; the structure of the application, domain

specific plumbing, etc. Everytime feels like wasted effort.

StreamBase lets me focus on the stuff that requires thought, not

the details of implementation, connectivity, processing events,

and so on. Another comment is around the aggregate operator. It

is analogous to another API to learn. It's an incredibly rich and

flexible operator that I think almost qualifies as its own sub

language or sub paradigm. There's a lot there and a

lot of subtlety in its behavior, learn about and study

it!

Mike Grandilone, J.P. Morgan Asset

Management: The shift to a message passing structure is sometimes

a shift in thinking. It's key to understanding how

StreamBase handles the life of a tuple; we gained that through

experience.

Talk

about the applications you've built with

StreamBase

Joseph Chua, GAIN

Capital: After 4 days of training and going through the examples,

I built my first StreamBase application in just three hours, and

it was fully deployed in a week. It connects to market data,

manipulates the data, and stores it in a high-speed database.

We've also built market making and real-time surveillence

applications, and many more to come.

Phil:

I've built several applications with StreamBase. One is

an "indication of interest" (IOI) app that

monitors trading interest and compares it against a CRM system

and sends alerts to individual sales traders because they have a

customer who either has traded on the symbol, transacted above a

given threshold, or has a real-time order for it. The correlation

of these factors in real-time also includes real-time news

sources. Also, I've worked on two algorithmic trading

systems that host their strategies in StreamBase and perform

real-time risk checks on the algos, and an ETF arbitrage system

where there was only one strategy, but it was a very involved

strategy.

Mike: We brought a smart order

routing system up and running in 6 months with 2 developers,

which we thought was very fast. We also got the business people

involved in the canvas and the development - this is a very

important factor in getting applications done quickly.

Talk about the benefits of StreamBase and

visual programming

Phil:

StreamBase helps facilitate communication. Whenever you want to

convey information about a system, you always draw a picture. And

they almost always look like StreamBase Event Flow. If you have

taken the necessary care to clearly delineate modules, then,

depending on the technical sophistication of who you are talking

to, you can choose how far to drill down. It's extremely

helpful in faciliating technical discourse; with the business

users, it saves time.

Mike: Visual development

has really improved the speed of our development. Especially when

you're doing a proof of concept. It helps you understand

the application's logic, and also communicate with the

business; in typical programming environments like Java,

you're not going to show many people the code, but you

can do it with StreamBase.

Joseph: The big

value is that all the technical details are abstracted away in

terms of connectivity and low-level code; we can then communicate

with the business owners, so development cycles are shorter and

more efficient. The other value we have found is they we can very

quickly build a prototype solution so the business can make

decisions more quickly with respect to requirements and decisions

to develop the applications.

Phil: One thing

that's helpful: with StreamBase, you can tell at a glance

that spaghetti code is spaghetti code. You can tell if an

application was thoughtfully designed without hours and hours and

hours of code review.

What best

practices have you learned from your experiences with

CEP?

Mike: You need to shift

your thinking, to think in terms of events, rather than

traditional static applications. And, just like any application,

build a testing environment at the same time as your application

logic.

Joseph: Identify the connection points

quickly, be open minded and willing to unlearn the more

traditional ways of development, use StreamBase interfaces, and

make sure you continuously refactor the application.

Phil: There are lot of resources for ramping up

StreamBase skills - invest the effort to develop your skills. The

speed of putting together something quickly is a great asset. The

thing to keep in mind is that although the development speed of

StreamBase is a benefit in the short term, it can, if

you're not careful, work against you in the long

term.

Phil: While the principles

aren't different, the practice IS different. The first

thing that sold me is seeing the ease with which you can change

and tune your threading model, take things in and out of the

threading part of your system, with multiplicity and dispatch

methods. Scalability and performance is about taking more

advantage of the cores in a system, and careful management of it

becomes more and more important.

What was your experience integrating other

code into CEP?

Mike: We have

separate routing logic written in Java for routing logic that we

integrated with our StreamBase application. We've done a

lot of work with custom Java operators in StreamBase -

it's very straight forward - no problem in doing it.

There's lots of power in developing in Java for code that

isn't event driven that allowed us to bring in the power

of algorithmic trading as a drop-in to the StreamBase

environment. Also, we have a C# front end GUI, which uses the

.NET interface from StreamBase - this was easy, although the

challenge was how to take a GUI that isn't event-based

and make it work with an event-driven application. We're

in production with that now.

The

StreamBase community

Phil:

I've put two components onto the href="http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream_process/

www.streambase.com/sbx" target="_self">StreamBase Component

Exchange - mostly adapters. The publishing process was

straightforward. One is an adapter that watches for events on the

file system and creates StreamBase events when files are created,

renamed, modified, or deleted, and another one listens for calls

on a web service interface and creates events for the

applciation. I suggest other developers look at the utility

classes - see what are other developers are doing, and pick up

some tips and techniques and helpful hands-on examples of how

they are building their applications.

StreamBase Resources for

Developers

Below are the

StreamBase resources mentioned in this

roundtable:

• Trial version of StreamBase: href="http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream_process/www.streambase.com/download"

  target="_self">www.streambase.com/download

• Product documentation: href="http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream_process/docs.streambase.com"

  target="_self">docs.streambase.com

• Personalized demonstrations: href="http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream_process/www.streambase.com/forms/request-a-demonstration"

  target="_self">www.streambase.com/forms/request-a-demonstration

• "How To" developer webinars: href="http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream_process/www.streambase.com/webinars"

  target="_self">www.streambase.com/webinars

• StreamBase Component Exchange: href="http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream_process/www.streambase.com/sbx"

  target="_self">www.streambase.com/sbx

• StreamBase University: href="http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream_process/

  www.streambase.com/sbu" target="_self">

  www.streambase.com/sbu

• StreamBase

  Training and Certification: href="http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream_process/www.streambase.com/community/training-and-certification"

  target="_self">www.streambase.com/community/training-and-certification

• Datasports blog for StreamBase CEP developers: href="http://datasports.ca"

  target="_self">http://datasports.ca