Comment by strictfp

Hmm.

>Event Sourcing. As far as I can tell this is basically the enterprise software engineer's way of saying "state machine replication". It's interesting that the same idea would be invented again in such a different context. Event sourcing seems to focus on smaller, in-memory use cases.

Fowlers article doesn't read like that at all if you ask me. He is talking about the general concept of using an event log as a storage mechanism. Very similar to the OPs afticle. And if you look at the date, Martins article is from 2005. Credit where credit is due.

In the Java world, the idea of event sourcing was made publicly known by the project 'prevlayer'. These guys boldly suggested to store the current snapshot in RAM, yes, but had also built mechanisms for event logging, snapshotting and replay. The log was persisted on disk and replayed at startup.

The prevlayer guys were in fact not enterprise at all, quite the opposite. Their ideas caused quite a stir in the enterprise world.