Last week, at this year’s JAX London conference, I gave a talk about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the very interesting and specific implications for applications that use event sourcing. The talk was inspired and partly based on two earlier articles that I wrote: Forget me please? Event sourcing and the GDPR and Event sourcing and the GDPR: a follow-up.
Event sourcing
Event Sourcing & The GDPR – Erasing your data footprint
Recently, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. You’ve probably heard all about it (or at least seen the absurd amount of ‘update privacy policy’ emails in your inbox). In any case, the GDPR attempts to regulate data protection for EU citizens, and is applicable to any organization that deals with EU citizens.
The GDPR has many implications for any software or organization that processes data. However, if you are considering implementing event sourcing in your application (or have already done so), there are a few provisions in the regulation that have specific implications for event sourced applications.
Rebuilding projections in Axon Framework 3
CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) allows you to have separate models for reading and writing. Combining that pattern with Event Sourcing leads to a powerful capability: updating query (read) models, based on events. In real-time or rebuilding them from an existing collection of events. This post focuses on such projections, in applications that are built on Axon Framework.
CQRS & Event Sourcing article published in PHP Architect
This month an article I wrote for PHP Architect, called “CQRS & Event Sourcing in the Wild”, was published in the December 2017 “Talking Code” issue.
Event sourcing and the GDPR: a follow-up
My article about the implications of the GDPR for event-sourced applications that I published last week generated a sizable number of responses, suggestions and comments (most of them on Twitter). All of which are appreciated of course! In this post I’ll list the most interesting comments and try to respond to them.
Upcasters or a versioned event store: pros and cons
In a previous article, I wrote a few things about upcasters. One of the significant downsides when implementing an upcaster is that it adds to our application’s technical debt. An alternative technique is the versioned event store (or versioned event stream), where the existing event store is copied and modified. In this post I’ll discuss the pros and cons of both approaches.
Forget me please? Event sourcing and the GDPR
In May 2018, a new piece of EU legislation called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect. The GDPR attempts to regulate data protection for individuals within the EU and has very interesting and specific implications for applications that use event sourcing. In this article, I’ll discuss my thoughts on this subject and a few pointers for those implications.
Using Tracking processors to replay events in Axon Framework 3
Replaying events is a crucial part in any event sourcing / cqrs application, to rebuild projections, generate new ones or seed external systems with data.
I’m a big fan of the Axon Framework. Even with its quirks and occasional (strange) bugs, it’s my go-to toolbox for my event sourcing & cqrs consulting and development work.
With the recent 3.0 release, Axon changed the way events can be replayed by introducing the Subscribing and Tracking event processors. The Subscribing processor follows the event stream in real-time, whereas the Tracking processor keeps track of events it has processed (using a token). This means that the Tracking processor can be stopped and resumed, and it will pick up processing where it left off.
Using annotations in Prooph
One of the things I love about Java is its native, compiler-level support for annotations, a form of syntactic metadata which can be applied to source code but also retain at run-time to influence application behavior. I use them almost daily in my projects.
I do a fair amount of consulting and development on event sourced applications and these usually use Axon, a popular CQRS & event sourcing framework. Recently, Axon version 3 was released, supporting a number of annotations that can turn any POJO (Plain Old Java Object) into an event-sourced aggregate.
CQRS & Event Sourcing in the wild (PHP Benelux 2017)
Below are the slides of my talk “CQRS & Event Sourcing in the wild”, as presented at PHP Benelux 2017.