For the past 10 years the concept of service oriented architectures has dominated the conversation when it comes to application development in the enterprise.

But the reality is that nothing in the enterprise is as orderly as a SOA model would suggest. As enterprise developers continue to rediscover that issue, more IT organizations are realizing they need to build applications around an event driven architecture (EDA) model that better reflects the simple fact that most business processes are basically waiting for an event to happen before a series of responses are initiated.

This doesn't mean that SOA is a waste of time. Instead, enterprise organizations are discovering that SOA only represents half the equation. It's important to make discrete sets of functionality available as a service. But those services need to have events they can respond to. Among providers of application middleware trying to bridge the gap between SOA and EDA are Tibco and Progress Software. Tibco most recently released version 3.0 of BusinessEvents, a piece of middleware that the company enhanced to add an improved user interface for modeling applications that span both SOA and EDA models. Progress Software, meanwhile, has been banging the drum around a class of application development tools now being referred to as complex event processing for a few years now.

None of this means that the need for specific SOA or EDA development tools from vendors such as Oracle and IBM are going to away any time soon. But it does show that slowly but surely the enterprise application development space is finally starting to mature beyond various acronyms that in reality represent concepts that are little more than a means to an end.

That end should be the ability to quickly model and business process in a set of abstractions that are flexible enough to allow a business to quickly adapt to any set of changing circumstances. The idea that a business should have to wait 18 months or more to change course because the IT systems can't keep up with the rate of change in the business goes against every thing that information technology is suppose to stand for. Clearly, we need higher levels of abstraction above the SOA and EDA level to make it substantially easier to inject greater levels of flexibility into our IT systems.

The good news is that have 40 years of effort it looks likely we're finally getting somewhere. The bad news is, obviously, the 40 years of effort it took to get this far. Then again, given how long Moses spent wandering the desert. Maybe that's just how much time it takes humanity to find where we're ultimately going no matter what we're doing.