Gregor’s Ramblings on Patterns - Enterprise Integration Patterns

This blog chronicles my journey with asynchronous and distributed system design over two decades. These are my Ramblings related to Patterns [See all Ramblings]. Subscribe to my ramblings via RSS.

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Enterprise Integration Patterns are timeless. That's why our book keeps selling well 20 years after its publication in 2003. However, the code examples haven't aged quite as well. I therefore updated several code examples to use modern tech like GoLang, Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS, Azure Cloud Functions, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub. Read more »

We were tempted multiple times to extend the EIP icon language, but always felt that simplicity should win over precision. However, seeing the visual vocabulary that my former Google colleague Ivan Gevirtz created, I am convinced that combining the two is useful. Read more »

Blogging about design patterns seems about as original as blogging about the Java (TM) Programming Language, except for the missing (TM). However, as I just attended a workshop on software service engineering, I realized once again that people from different fields have very different notions about the concept and usage of patterns. Many workshop attendees raised questions about formalizing patterns, tooling, etc. I touched on this subject a tiny bit in a post from long time ago, but I figured that the topic really deserves more attention, especially since to me a pattern is so much more than the "proven solution to a recurring problem within a specific context." Read more »

I confess. I am a groupie. When Tim O'Reilly invited me to be part of a workshop on Web 2.0 patterns I was quite excited. First, because I was going to meet the exalted one in person. Second, because I would have a chance to learn a lot about Web 2.0 as I am pretty much starting from zero. Read more »

Hanging out with my intellectual drinking buddies reminded me that our integration patterns have been embraced by a fair number of commercial as well as open source projects. In my eyes this is really the best indicator of success for a pattern language. Latin, a dead language used mostly by doctors to sound more knowledgeable, is not a good model for a pattern language. You want a language that is alive and actually used by people. Talking to a few folks who did embrace our language motivated me to take a quick survey of the places where our patterns pop up. Read more »

On a recent project we developed a Web services framework that supports asynchronous callbacks and asynchronous invocation with polling. The difficulties we had describing what we were trying to do to my fellow ThoughtWorkers on other projects prompted me to discuss the different forms of asynchrony in a little more detail. Read more »

Last year's OOPSLA tutorial on Enterprise Integration Patterns was quite well received. The most frequent constructive criticism was that the whole tutorial was PowerPoint as opposed to running code. I took that feedback to heart and set out to develop a toolkit that demonstrates the routing and transformation patterns in our book. After a lot of deja-vu in Windows GDI programming I created a toolkit that contains each pattern as a small executable. The toolkit is a lot of fun and makes for great demos, but it also triggered a bigger question. Are patterns meant to be codified as components? Read more »

When using asynchronous messaging, we can no longer rely on the linear, in-sequence execution of events. Therefore, the notion of correlating multiple messages is fundamental to designing robust messaging solutions. While correlation seems to be a simple concept at first glance, there are quite a few interesting nuances. Read more »