What do you mean by “Event-Driven”

Towards the end of last year I attended a workshop with my colleagues in
ThoughtWorks to discuss the nature of “event-driven” applications. Over the last
few years we've been building lots of systems that make a lot of use of events, and
they've been often praised, and often damned. Our North American office organized a
summit, and ThoughtWorks senior developers from all over the world showed up to
share ideas.

The biggest outcome of the summit was recognizing that when people talk about
“events”, they actually mean some quite different things. So we spent a lot of time
trying to tease out what some useful patterns might be. This note is a brief
summary of the main ones we identified.

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