Chapter 8. Enterprise integration patterns

Today’s businesses aren’t run on a single monolithic system, and most businesses have a full range of disparate systems. There is an ever-increasing demand for those systems to integrate with each other and with external business partners and government systems.

Let’s face it, integration is hard. To help deal with the complexity of integration problems, enterprise integration patterns (EIPs) have become the standard way to describe, document, and implement complex integration problems. We explain the patterns we discuss in this book, but to learn more about them and others, see the Enterprise Integration Patterns website and the associated book: http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/.

8.1. Introducing enterprise integration patterns

Apache Camel implements EIPs, and because the EIPs are essential building blocks in the Camel routes, you’ll bump into EIPs throughout this book, starting in chapter 2. It would be impossible for this book to cover all the EIPs Camel supports, which currently total around 60 patterns. This chapter is devoted to covering five of the most powerful and feature-rich patterns. The patterns discussed in this chapter are listed in table 8.1.

8.2. The Aggregator EIP

8.3. The Splitter EIP

8.4. The Routing Slip EIP

8.5. The Dynamic Router EIP

8.6. The Load Balancer EIP

8.7. Summary and best practices