Many formalisms have been proposed for specifying patterns of events and responses to the recognition of such patterns. Too often, these formalisms are intricate, unintuitive, and unfamiliar to typical programmers. We propose an alternative that is simple, intuitive, and familiar: regular expressions with placeholders for particular types of events, interleaved with actions that perform computations and emit output events. We have designed and implemented a language called EventScript that uses such regular expressions as the basis for building event-processing applications. Through dozens of short examples, spanning the spectrum from device-level events to cyber-physical system events to business events, we show that regular expressions with actions are a powerful and versatile basis for specifying event-processing logic.
By: Norman H. Cohen
Published in: RC24517 in 2008
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