Administering Halo
Without getting into too great a detail, I should mention that the
console will also allow for administration of the Halo server.
Halo is built for an enterprise environment, and as such
provides operational statistics and performance scalability. I
had no performance issues whatsoever in running Halo on my small
test machine, though I admittedly didn't have numerous
processors and complex BAM applications running.
Real-World BAMming
As a final note, and in case anyone hasn't quite gotten the
picture of how useful BAM applications can be, I should mention
a few possible applications:
- Marketplace monitoring: an event-driven application could
monitor prices of supplies or watch for specific items on B2B
exchanges and either automatically make purchases or notify
buyers.
- Financial analysis: using Halo (or another event server) to
monitor financial information within an organization could alert
controllers or other interested parties when key numbers change
in certain ways. This same principal could be used to monitor
any crucial internal business information, such as sales data or
vendor/supplier information.
- Real-time trading: by responding to events, such as price
increases or drops in commodities or derivatives, traders could
greatly benefit by implementing responses to specific
events.
- Fraud detection: by monitoring credit card activity,
specific patterns could be discovered and action taken to
discover and halt fraud.
As you can see, the possibilities are certainly intriguing and
somewhat boundless in scope. It seems that event-based
applications could be deployed by most enterprise companies to
obtain some type of return on investment.
Conclusion
Overall, I was impressed with Halo. The overall idea of event-
based applications and the concept of an event server seems like
a model worthy of pursuing. In addition, at version 4 Halo seems
to be fairly well evolved from both an administrator and
developer standpoint. I would recommend most enterprises at
least evaluate the possibility of employing event-based
applications.
Drew Falkman is
the author of the JRun Web Application Construction Kit and co-
author (with Ben Forta) of Reality ColdFusion: J2EE Integration,
both published by Macromedia Press. Over the past 6 years, Drew
has developed over 150 Web applications in all sizes using
ColdFusion and Java. Currently Drew consults, speaks at events,
writes for numerous publications, and teaches courses at
Portland State University. His latest project through his
consulting company, Veraison LLC, was a real-time cattle auction
using Flash Remoting and Flash Communication Server. In
addition, Drew is a member of Team Macromedia, a certified
ColdFusion Developer and a certified Macromedia instructor.
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