Responding to real-time changes and events in a timely manner is becoming one of the most important requirements for an enterprise framework. This article discusses technologies and mechanisms that enable a service-oriented framework to effectively respond to real-time stimuli and, therefore, send and receive synchronous and asynchronous events across layers of an architectural stack without knowing the details of the underlying event system.
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-01-2005/jw-0131-soa.html