Preface

Software has been an integral part of enterprises and a key contributor to their growth. Be it analytics, user experience, social marketing, decision support systems, or any other functional domain, software has been used to aid smooth and efficient functioning. Enterprises start small and grow over a period of time, and so does their software dependency. Enterprise applications are developed over a period of time. The following aspects pose certain challenges while dealing with enterprise software:

  • They are distributed across a set of domains, for example, payroll, inventory, reporting, and social integration.
  • Each of these modules might have been developed independent of each other and may be on different platforms, for example, employee self-portal in J2EE stack, legacy records management on mainframes, CRM system using Salesforce, with some real-time application in their proprietary implementation.
  • These modules need to interact with each other and with external systems as well. They may have to consume data from external sources through SOAP services or shared files, or they themselves have to share data though one of many data-sharing techniques.
  • As software grows old, we need to introduce new platforms and replace existing modules to alleviate the growing maintenance cost. A rip and replace strategy would not work; rather, this should be done in a homogenous way without disturbing the sanity of existing modules during the transitions.

Integration of these modules either inside organizations or with external partners is inherently complex, requiring integration of heterogeneous endpoints. This is the kind of scenario that Enterprise Application Integration tries to address. Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) is a collection of standard enterprise challenges and how can they be handled. Spring Integration is one of the implementations of the EIP that provides many off-the-shelf components recommended by EIP.

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