Event logs and event streams can be found in software systems of very diverse kinds. For instance, workflow management systems and ERP platforms produce event logs in some common format based on XML.

Financial transaction systems also keep a log of their operations in some standardized and documented format, as is the case for web servers such as Apache and Microsoft IIS. Network monitors also receive streams of packets whose various headers and fields can be analyzed. Recently, even the world of video games has seen an increasing trend towards the logging of players’ realtime activities.

Analyzing the wealth of information contained in these logs can serve multiple purposes. Business process logs can be used to reconstruct a workflow based on a sample of its possible executions; financial database logs can be audited for compliance to regulations; suspicious or malicious activity can be detected by studying patterns in network or server logs. However, the available tools to process logs or streams of events are often large systems that are hard to setup, and even simple examples seem needlessly complicated.

In this book, you will learn about BeepBeep, a versatile Java library intended to make the processing of event streams both fun and simple.

Through more than a hundred simple, illustrated code examples, you will see how running event processing tasks can be done in just a few lines of code—and what is more, code that you actually understand. From generating plots to computing statistics and evaluating temporal logic specifications, BeepBeep can prove a handy addition to a developer’s toolbox.