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Joeychgo.com Book Store > Joeychgo.com books beginning with E
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Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) |
Author: Gregor Hohpe
Published: 2003-10-20 |
List price: $59.99
Our price: $47.99
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As of: December 04th, 2008 12:00:58 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Excellent book for validating designs at work...
We had to redesign one of our really broken systems at work.
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br /I validated our whiteboard sessions on the redesign by replacing every concept we discussed with a design pattern from this book mainly just for fun.
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br /At the first meeting no one changed anything I drew and our main architect accepted the pattern based designed no questions asked and no changes whatsoever.
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br /If you're architecting a data integration project at work get a cup of coffee and this book and get crackin'.
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br /Remove much of the risk of refactoring your big apps at work.
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The essential messaging pattern reference and referee for enterprise architects
Deciding on the best solution for an integration problem often involves difficult discussions between architects and implementors each of whom may hold a widely differing point of view. Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf have provided a marvelous reference that clearly depicts and explains the messaging pattern choices to be considered along with their respective merits. Being able to match the problem with these patterns and authoritatively illuminate and quickly settle design team discussions fully justifies having this reference near at hand.
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br /When viewing all the forces on a pattern over the longer term, the right solution will often require a bit of additional design and implementation effort vis-a-vis the quickest (or entrenched) solution. By communicating, discussing, and applying widely-understood patterns the overall construction and maintenance costs for integration can certainly be reduced.
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br /One real example of a much better implementation that resulted from this book was the application of the Claim Check pattern to pass a token representing a large PDF document in the message, rather than encode and embed the document itself. The book explains the pattern clearly, and the implementation was not only easier to work with (because the message payload was much smaller), but the solution has subsequently become a better fit with Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) middleware since the XML for the transaction and its metadata can be rapidly transformed without being burdened by passing the bulky PDF data within the message.
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br /Another example was solved by using the book's detailed explanation of the Correlation Identifier pattern to facilitate the redesign of an legacy transaction message. The existing application had embedded the correlation identifier in the business message which limited the implementation to a single asynchronous message exchange. By following the book's recommendation to persist the correlation identifier outside of the business message, the application could be more readily integrated using standard messaging ESB middleware tools and became reusable in environments that required more than one messaging hop.
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br /In both of these examples, the book served both to educate the participates on the relevant patterns and then served as a "referee" to move the discussion towards a standard and extendable solution. Without the benefit of this book as an authoritative reference, it would have been very difficult to introduce new flexible and agile messaging-based architectural solutions.
 JMS mostly
The patterns in this book were illustrated mostly with JMS. There were mentions of Tibco and webMethods a few places though. It makes it sound like most of the ideas for common integration patterns started in IBM labs. My background is mostly in a commercial middleware and I recognized most of the patterns from the projects I've done the last 6 years.
br /The mention of BPEL in the future trends section was prophetic. It looks like all the major vendors are moving toward orchestration using BPEL.
br /The design patterns were fairly comprehensive but I've noticed that more are being built around SOA and WOA today. Most companies are now using SOA and REST for integrations were it makes sense to do so.
Imperative for integration projects
I used this book on a recent consulting engagement and found it to be extremely useful. The authors discuss topics in depth then identify patterns in that area.
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br /As an experienced Architect, one of the challenges I find in discussing solutions at a design level is the tendency of people to speak in implementation terms. This skews the design and makes it difficult to connect the solution with the business goals.
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br /Hohpe Woolfe's book provides an informative and practical language to creating flexible integration architecture.
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Like the Ragu Spaghetti Sauce Commercial said ... "It's in there"
I am an occasional buyer of reference works on software technologies I need to get familiar with, and I teach an evening section at a local area college in object oriented analysis and design. After reading this book, I am actively trying to construct a proposal for a new course based on its contents ... it's that good.
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br / Quite simply, Enterprise Integration Patterns blew me away, on both a technical and pedagogical level. On the technical level, it's all here (except for "aspect" patterns like security, robustness and scalability which would each have really required another book). All the patterns necessary to successfully support asynchronous messaging between groups of remote applications ... which is the basic situation facing anyone trying to do a mashup of web services and / or construct business processes by integrating internal services via an ESB. Even the Process Manager pattern is here.
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br / On a pedagogical level, the material is complete, very easy to read, well illustrated, and above all, well organized. Even a first look at the inside covers reveals this. The front has each of the 60+ patterns listed alphabetically, with its respective icon and 2 sentence paragraph. The back has the patterns (name and icon) clumped into 6 hierarchical "pattern buckets" (Message Endpoints, Message Construction, Message Channels, Message Routing, Message Transformation, and System Management), linked together in a single diagram, showing where the buckets fit when Application A is connected to Application B.
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br / And on both inside covers as well as every place in the text where a pattern is mentioned (quite a bit since patterns are extensively contrasted with each other), the page number where it is defined is given with its name. This makes it very easy to use this book as a reference, because all the patterns it contains are cross-referenced in so many ways.
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br / After an excellent introduction the first chapter explains what a pattern is, what the domain of integration patterns are, and introduces the Widget Manufacturing Company, whose problem grows as tools to handle those problems are introduced.
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br / Bottom line ... I read this book during the two legs of a round trip flight from Chicago to San Francisco, took copious notes within the pages of the book, and walked off the 2nd plane feeling that I had seriously increased my understanding of the entire topic of how to integrate loosely coupled applications.
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br / Not bad ... plus since I snagged an upgrade on the return flight, I can also report that two glasses of wine did not interfere in the slightest with the learning experience. The book is THAT good.
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