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

by Hohpe Gregor

Aristotle also mischievously posed one of the most influential rhetorical questions ever to trouble software architecture: Is the world predominantly a series of processes, or is it a series of objects? Messaging standards reply with an answer worthy of a Zen disciple: yes. The world is a series of objects whose most important characteristics are usually the processes through which they engage with and relate to other objects. It is often an object’s behaviors related to other objects rather than its own internal composition that turn out to be most significant. In the realm of Web services and enterprise integration, this object/process hybrid view is referred to as the business process component. The business process component unites a series of services into a logical unit that interacts with other such units via messaging to achieve highly scalable, resilient flows of logic and data. The coalescence of process, object, and interaction patterns into a business process component is the future of messaging as seen by many Web services vendors and standards bodies.