Chapter 2. Enterprise integration fundamentals
This chapter covers
- Loose coupling and event-driven architectures
- Synchronous and asynchronous interaction models
- The most important enterprise integration styles
Commercial applications are, most of the time, solutions to problems posed by the business units for which they’re developed. It makes little difference whether the problem under discussion is older, and the solution is automating an existing process, or the problem is new, and the solution is an innovation that allows the organization to do business in a way that wasn’t possible before.
In some cases, the solutions consist of newly developed components that reuse already-existing applications by delegating functionality to them. This is often the case with legacy applications that implement complex business logic and for which a complete rewrite would be an unjustifiable cost. Other applications are divided from the beginning into multiple components that run independently to get the most out of the modern hardware and its high concurrency capabilities. What both these approaches have in common is that they tie together separate components and applications, sometimes even located on different machines. Such applications are the focus of enterprise application integration.