Advice on Enterprise Integration Pattern

[Claude Moore]

Hi guys,

I'm evaluating if buy or not Enterprise Integration Pattern by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf.
The book is usually considerated a "must to read" , but I'm bit afraid of the fact it was printed in 2003, more then ten years ago.
Usually patterns book don't became obsolete (I'm thinking of Design Patterns by the Gang of four, for example) since usually they're technology and language agnostic,
but I'd like to hear from people more expert than me on the subject if it is still worth buying.

Thank you for your kind help.

[Marco Ehrentreich]

Hi Claude,

in my opinion the book is still worth buying and the best book I know on this subject. As you already said pattern books are relatively technology agnostic and so is this one. The patterns and concepts in the book are still valid today although there may be better tools and frameworks today to solve the issues these patterns address.

Marco

[Claude Moore]

Marco, thanks for ypur reply. In your answer you're saying that nowadays there may be other ways to solve issues EAI patterns illustrates, showing maybe a different technology to adopt. For example, i think that nowadays ESB may help a lot handling message integration between applications, and esb weren't so popular whe the book was written (i think that esb weren't implemented at all).Anyway, do you think that principles of approaching a problem are still valid? I would guess yes..

[Marco Ehrentreich]

As I said the concepts and principles behind the patterns discussed in this book are still valid today. Tools like ESBs, integration frameworks etc. are just implementations of the most common patterns. Of course these technologies may have improved a lot during the past 10 years but the problems they are trying to solve are mostly the same that are described in the book even if it doesn't mention such tools explicitly.

Marco

[Claude Moore]

Thanks Marco, you helped me a lot.