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

by Hohpe Gregor

Asynchronous messaging is fundamentally a pragmatic reaction to the problems of distributed systems. Sending a message does not require both systems to be up and ready at the same time. Furthermore, thinking about the communication in an asynchronous manner forces developers to recognize that working with a remote application is slower, which encourages design of components with high cohesion (lots of work locally) and low adhesion (selective work remotely). Messaging systems also allow much of the decoupling you get when using File Transfer (43). Messages can be transformed in transit without either the sender or receiver knowing about the transformation. The decoupling allows integrators to choose between broadcasting messages to multiple receivers, routing a message to one of many receivers, or other topologies. This separates integration decisions from the development of the applications. Since human issues tend to separate application development from application integration, this approach works with human nature rather than against it.