Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))

by Hohpe Gregor

Two mental artifacts provide the highest levels of abstraction in software architecture today: programming orientations, which include object-oriented programming, service-oriented programming, generative programming, and the like; and pattern languages, such as those documented in this book. If a particular orientation or design pattern proves useful, and if its context proves to recur frequently, the tactics and strategies used to implement the pattern often become very similar. Pattern solutions on multiple platforms, products, and applications end up owning very few differences—but those few differences are often frustrating growth inhibitors, typically semantic in nature, and produce interoperability that hinders sophistication of scale. To extend the reach of applications and the patterns on which they’re based, such differences tend to be eliminated from products and platforms through formally agreed-upon standards.