Enterprise Integration Patterns

This book could really be titled "Everything You Wanted to Know About Message-Based EAI, But Were Afraid To Ask". It's a very comprehensive book, which goes beyond mere patterns to introduce the reader to a wide range of topics in the world of messaging. It forms a strong and useful counterpart to the many more general books on architecture patterns, for example Martin Fowler's "Enterprise Architecture Patterns" in the same series. The book is very accessible, written and illustrated clearly and assuming very little initial knowledge. However it will also provide value to the experienced messaging developer, formalising his or her knowledge and suggesting new ways of using messaging to solve different problems. I particularly like the way that Hohpe and Woolfe lay out each pattern using language and visual styles to naturally delimit the sections of the pattern, rather than using lots of sub-headings. This increases the readability significantly. Several books on patterns talk about a "pattern language", the idea of describing a complete design in terms of named patterns for the architectural form of each component. However this is one of the first books I have read which really adopt this idea - the authors have created a new visual language, which they first use to describe basic patterns in terms of basic message constructs, and then describe more complex patterns and solutions using the icons for the intermediate patterns. Best of all you can download a Visio stencil from the website and start using and extending the pattern language yourself. The book is remarkably technology-agnostic, providing many examples in both .NET and Java forms, and with a fair sprinkling of other technologies, for example using proprietary EAI tools such as Tibco. I have certainly seen and used some of these patterns in older file-based integration schemes, and I suspect many of them work for Web Services too. As such the book has a much better claim to be a true "patterns" book than one wedded solely to a single technology base. Each group of pattern descriptions is followed by a detailed "practical example" section which shows how one or more messaging technologies can implement the preceding patterns to solve real problems. There aren't any real "antipatterns" in the book, but the book is realistic about when a given technology or pattern should not be used, which is just as valuable. If I have a complaint it's a minor one, that the book is too long. Including the multiple introductions, it runs to over 700 pages. Dipping in and out my read through has taken many months. Like many patterns books, in an attempt to keep each description self-contained you find by half-way through that some basic things are being repeated regularly. A more "normalised" structure might have been better. Also, although most of the book is very readable, a couple of chapters by "guest" authors, including the final one on Web Service standards, take a more academic tone. That said, this is an excellent book, which can be read from cover to cover, or stands as a general-purpose reference, and I strongly recommend it.

Along with Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture, this book holds the core knowledge for developers looking to get more involved in design and those looking to step up as an Architect in an environment that involves some level of messaging. I came to this book while working on a project that required two disparate databases to be synchronised. The initial painful experiment of polling for changes was thrown out and we moved to an efficient event-based system using a message queue. Using this book allowed us to side step many issues (such as mutating table errors) and also provided us with a syntactically reference which created a common vocabulary. Such a simple thing but it saved hours of time as we were all aware of what each other in a large team mean when we discussed such things as Message Channels, Idempotent Receivers, Content Enricher and Even-Driven Consumers. As a tip, I would recommend that all Java developers download Apache Camel which was designed around these patterns. This allows you to see first hand how and why these patterns are so useful and really compliment the book.

I'm an architect for an integration company, so this book is a must read for someone in a similar position. It's not an easy read as it's not a fun read, but it's worth persevering with to become familiar with all of the patterns - it then serves as a great reference and has pride of place on my desk at work.

I read this book in 2010 and it gave me a big shift in my thinking and understanding of building losely coupled distributed systems, helping me jump to the next level of software engineering. Tech stacks and terminology may have evolved on but the patterns and concepts are timeless. An absolute classic, foundational and a great read.

In my job role as Solutions Architect my colleague recommended this book. Having loaned his copy I decided to get my own - it's as simple as that. I have to say for an IT book to be printed in 2004 and yet still be relevant is a surprise. The topics covered are as relevant than as they are today. Applications need to talk to each other, there are still challenges to integration, so I can't recommend this highly enough. If you have worked in integration for a couple of years, you'll find that you've probably seen many of the issues explained in this book and will recognise some of the patterns...

Superfast delivery which was ahead of schedule. Good book and highly recommended.

Although I have kept this book on my wish list for many years because I generally buy cutting technology titles, I finally decided to buy it and got the kindle version. Now I regret I didn't buy it years ago, as it would have given me the knowledge I've learnt in the hard way through experience. I believe it is still the best book on messaging and a must have for any serious software architect. I especially like the balance between theoretical content and practical examples.

This book is a must for all novices and advanced developers alike, who are working on software integration projects.It is definitely a mistake to carry out any work with REST, JMS, AMQP etc. without it. It provides a thorough explanation of how to implement commonly encountered design patterns, thus equipping a developer with the programming tools of how to build a scalable and extensible system.