Most organizations at this point in time have made up their minds about SOA, such as when and if they will eventually invest in it, and if so, what tools and vendors are the best fit for the job. Yet as the ever evolving technology sector should have it, many vendors in the SOA landscape are now churning a new concept out to existing SOA customers, that of event-driven architecture (EDA), a seemingly new term which has at best blurred lines with the more widely used SOA acronym. So up next we will take a look at what constitutes EDA and its relevance to the SOA market.

Let's start by exploring what is perhaps the most common thing that comes to mind when saying "event" in an enterprise software context -- to many it will bring up thoughts of either messaging middleware, asynchronous communication, publish/subscribe topics, JMS, MSMQ or whatever other technology can used to establish event notification.