Guus Bosman

Enterprise Integration Patterns is part of the same series as Patterns of Enterprise Architecture, a book I didn't care much for 6 years ago because it was stating the obvious too often. The EIP book is from 2004 and is somewhat better, although at times it suffers from the same weakness.

I used it to look up good definitions of components I wanted to use in our product. The definitions of Message Bus and Message Router were particularly helpful. Not immediately helpful in deciding about implementation elements, but good for documenting and communication the design we had in mind.

At the other hand, the descriptions are superficial, and don't offer much insight. This is the same beef I had with "Enterprise Application Patterns" -- the content is too obvious.

Sometimes the book is overly simple. For example, the discussion on page 465 about Synchronous and Asynchronous consumers. "Polling provides the best throttling because if the server is busy, it won't ask for more message, so the messages will queue up." That is only true if you want your consumer to spend up to 100% of its time dealing with the queue -- more often you want to spend up to X% of its time and resources on events and other parts ready for other things in the application, for example to guarantee responsiveness in a user interface etc. Neither polling nor event-driven processing automatically get you that.

Nevertheless, there is great value in a common vocabulary and the book does a good job in indexing and describes the various patterns. I liked the graphics they used to describe the various interactions.