Enterprise Connectivity Patterns

The value of the enterprise service bus is well understood in the enterprise integration practice and yet the very flexibility offered by such a bus can in itself lead to a bewildering selection of choices when planning and building an integration architecture. This can be further compounded by the range of capabilities provided by the middleware products which support such architectural patterns. Moreover these products typically support not just the very specific notion of a service bus as an infrastructure for connecting and virtualizing services in the context of a broader service oriented architecture but the more general notion of the service bus as a connectivity infrastructure for services in a very generic sense. In this article we will use the term service bus (or enterprise service bus) in the much broader sense.

Capturing the experience gained through many real-life implementations and abstracting from this a core set of patterns provides a framework within which to make the appropriate architectural and implementation decisions, facilitate product selection and usage and benefit from a set of recommended and proven approaches to the integration of enterprise applications and services. In selecting and describing such patterns there are a number of different facets to be considered:

• -  The overall integration solution architecture pattern
• -  The interaction style(s) enforced between the endpoints
• -  The operational aspects required
• -  The security model to be applied
• -  Message-based integration
• -  Event-driven integration