Enterprise Integration Patterns

Integration, like other design activities, can benefit from sharing ideas and proven strategies in the form of patterns. An excellent starting point is Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf’s Enterprise Integration Patterns website and book.

In my recent work I’ve discovered a few patterns of my own, and I’ve started a page to document them.

First up is entitled “Change Indicator” . You may have a legacy system with an EAI adaptor, or a similar source of messages, which reports on the current state of key business objects. The messages will typically tell you when something has changed, but not necessarily what has changed, but the latter may be important to downstream systems. This pattern shows how to use EAI elements to add this information in a way which is totally transparent to the legacy system and existing users of the EAI scheme.