Some books cover technology, and some books cover concepts. Enterprise Integration Patterns tries to cover both. And I am saying 'tries' because the conceptual part is fantastic, and I'm guessing the technology part is pretty good too, but I don't know and don't care that much about 20-year-old, 'pre-cloud' messaging systems or the Java in general, etc.
Enterprise Integration Patterns reminded me of watching Star Trek The Original Series (ST: TOS) in my late 20s. As a big science fiction fan, it was fascinating to see the origin of many great SF concepts and stories used in so many forms decades later. However, it is still the Science Fiction show from the 60s; some things are off.
The authors are well aware of the problem of old examples and were kind enough to give us some contemporary examples, with modern tech stacks like GoLang, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
Who is this book for?
The book is an absolute classic. The book is for everyone interested in system design and messaging. Twenty years ago, systems like those described in the book were rare, but high-level messaging systems like those are standard today. This book and advances in the cloud, dev-ops, etc., are the reason.
I love to read old computer books. As developers, we take so many things for granted. With current messaging services, we get so much out of the box we forget da someone before had to define all those concepts and implement them in ready-to-go solutions. This book feels like a GOF (Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software) for messaging patterns.
I would like to see the new version of the book, or "spiritual sequel" from the same authors, ideally technology agnostic.
Book is part of Addison-Wesley signature series - Martin Fowler.
Authors
Gregor Hohpe
Gregor Hohpe is Director of Enterprise Strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Before AWS, Gregor worked as Smart Nation Fellow to the Singapore government, as Technical Director in Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO, and as Chief Architect at Allianz SE.
Check out Gregor's AWS Blog posts and his new website (and book) architect elevator.
Also, check one of my favorite architecture literature overviews, Gregor's architect bookshelf!
Bobby Woolf
Bobby Woolf is a Cloud Solution Architect at IBM. His area of interest includes cloud computing, cloud-native application architecture, microservices, DevOps, GitOps, Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes, Istio, IBM Cloud, etc.