Enterprise Integration Solutions

34 Part I Enterprise Integration Overview

Chapter Summary

If all this seems a little daunting, do not give up hope. Enterprise integration is

similar in many ways to normal distributed application development. The

design characteristics that make for a quality application also make for a quality

integration, only on a grander scale. When you create objects within an appli-

cation, they expose data and operations to other parts of the application

through an interface. In EI, the endpoints serve the same purpose. Both objects

and applications encapsulate, or hide, their implementation from you. You will

also find that many of the design patterns you are already familiar with remain

virtually unchanged in an EI solution.

This chapter cannot cover every single architectural option available to an

architect embarking on an EI project, but we hope it serves as a good introduc-

tion and saves you some time and effort in identifying key issues that appear in

most integration scenarios. Many of the topics introduced here are covered in

more detail in later chapters.