Patterns and Best Practices for Enterprise Integration

This site is dedicated to making the design and implementation of integration solutions easier. The solutions and approaches described here are relevant for integration tools and platforms such as IBM WebSphere MQ, TIBCO, Vitria, SeeBeyond, WebMethods, BizTalk, JMS,WCF, MSMQ, ESB's such as Sonic, Fiorano, ServiceMix, or Mule, plus SOA and Web-service based solutions.

All content on this site is original and is maintained by Gregor Hohpe. I have been building integration solutions for large clients for many years and enjoy sharing my findings with the community. I hope you find this material insightful and useful. Please contact me if you have suggestions or feedback.

Enterprise Integration Patterns - The Book

Enterprise integration remains harder than it really should be. While integration is inherently complex I felt that one of the major stumbling blocks is the lack of a common vocabulary and body of knowledge around asynchronous messaging architectures used to build integration solutions. Under the guidance of Martin Fowler and Kyle Brown, I teamed up with Bobby Woolf to create such a language in the form of 65 integration patterns (see the links on the right)

The book Enterprise Integration Patterns provides a consistent vocabulary and visual notation framework to describe large-scale integration solutions across many technologies. It also explores in detail the advantages and limitations of asynchronous messaging architectures. You will learn how to design code that connects an application to a messaging system, how to route messages to the proper destination and how to monitor the health of a messaging system. The patterns in the book are technology-agnostic and come to life with examples implemented in different messaging technologies, such as SOAP, JMS, MSMQ, .NET, TIBCO and other EAI Tools. Download a sample chapter!

Why Do We Need Integration?

Today's business applications rarely live in isolation. Users expect instant access to all business functions an enterprise can offer, regardless of which system the functionality may reside in. This requires disparate applications to be connected into a larger, integrated solution. This integration is usually achieved through the use of some form of "middleware". Middleware provides the "plumbing" such as data transport, data transformation, and routing.

What Makes Integration so Hard?

Architecting integration solutions is a complex task. There are many conflicting drivers and even more possible 'right' solutions. Whether the architecture was in fact a good choice usually is not known until many months or even years later, when inevitable changes and additions put the original architecture to test. Unfortunately, there is no "cookbook" for enterprise integration solutions. Most integration vendors provide methodologies and best practices, but these instructions tend to be very much geared towards the vendor-provided tool set and often lack treatment of the bigger picture, including underlying guidelines, principles and best practices.

Asynchronous Messaging Architectures

Asynchronous messaging architectures have proven to be the best strategy for enterprise integration because they allow for a loosely coupled solution that overcomes the limitations of remote communication, such as latency and unreliability. The trend towards asynchronous messaging has manifested itself in a variety of EAI suites as well emerging standards for reliable, asynchronous Web services. Unfortunately, asynchronous messaging is not without pitfalls. Many of the assumptions that hold true when developing single, synchronous applications are no longer valid. What is needed is vendor-independent design guidance on building robust integration architectures based on asynchronous messaging.

How can Patterns Help?

Patterns are a proven way to capture experts’ knowledge in fields where there are no simple “one size fits all” answers, such as application architecture, object-oriented design, or message-oriented integration . Each pattern poses a specific design problem, discusses the considerations surrounding the problem, and presents an elegant solution that balances the various forces or drivers. In most cases, the solution is not the first approach that comes to mind, but one that has evolved through actual use over time. As a result, each pattern incorporates the experience base that senior integration developers and architects have gained by repeatedly building solutions and learning from their mistakes. This implies that we did not “invent” the patterns; patterns are not invented, but rather discovered and observed from actual practice in the field.

The patterns on this site are by no means a complete treatment of all things integration. We focused on developing a cohesive set of patterns that would make a well rounded book. We continue to discover new patterns as part of our daily client work and hope to find the time to document them in the future.

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