Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions,   ISBN:9780321200686

Customer Rating: 

This review is for the kindle version of the book.

So far, the book has been an excellent discussion on integration patterns in general and messaging in particular. I would likely give the text version of the book a 4 or a 5 on content.

Unfortunately, the Kindle version suffers from some formatting flaws which bring the rating down a bit.

- The table of contents does not link directly to it's contents.
- Sidebar panels and examples (of which there are many) are almost unreadable because they are formatted in a such a way that the text flows off the page. One must select the text with the thumbstick and scroll back and forth to read it.

Hopefully, Addison-Wesley will correct the errors.

Customer Rating: 

If you are looking for a book on messaging, this is an excellent book. It is a very good source of learning messaging technology if you are a novice in this area. It is also an excellent source of advanced knowledge for more experienced IT professionals, who may be interested in more details and would like to see a structured approach to messaging.

In many situations messaging is an excellent way of integrating applications in an enterprise. However, messaging is not the best solution for all the integrations needed in an enterprise. There are many other ways of integrating applications and Service Oriented Architecture provides a more comprehensive method of integration as it encompasses many different technologies including messaging, RPC, sockets, ORBs, and ESB. A book by the present reviewer with the title "SOA-based Enterprise Integration: A step-by-step guide to services-based application integration" provides a more comprehensive description of the integration patterns. The book is being published by McGraw-Hill in May 2009.

Customer Rating: 

We had to redesign one of our really broken systems at work.

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.

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.

If you're architecting a data integration project at work get a cup of coffee and this book and get crackin'.

Remove much of the risk of refactoring your big apps at work.

Customer Rating: 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Customer Rating: 

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.
The mention of BPEL in the future trends section was prophetic. It looks like all the major vendors are moving toward orchestration using BPEL.
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.