Detecting and Coordinating Complex Patterns of Distributed Events with KETAL

This paper presents an event-based kernel library designed to explicitly construct and coordinate complex interactions and communication patterns in distributed applications. The library integrates facilities for explicitly defining complex event patterns, detecting events in distributed systems, and validating sequences of events having into account causal ordering. Concretely we present the following contributions: i) An analysis of non trivial scenarios found in distributed applications in order to formulate a set of requirements and restrictions for a kernel event-based library, ii) the design and implementation of the library supporting the detection and coordination of complex event patterns and the support of causal manipulation of distributed events, iii) a qualitative evaluation of our approach showing how this library can be used to build a sophisticated distributed aspect oriented language. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.