I continue to think about how we can develop Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions more efficiently and with higher quality. At this time, I zoomed in to investigate two key aspects, Agile EAI and Enterprise Integration Patterns:

Agile methods have taken the application developer community by storm. I want to see how we can transfer some of the benefits of Agile development (e.g. the ability to absorb changes) to the world of EAI and what kind of tools are required (e.g. test and build tools). For example, see my recent paper on Test-Driven Development in Enterprise Integration projects that Wendy and I wrote for ThoughtWorks.

I have collected Patterns of Enterprise Integration from my long list of client projects. The patterns provide reusable constructs that make EAI solution development more repeatable. My paper on enterprise integration patterns was accepted to the PLoP 2002 conference and has since evolved into a book.

Most of my "spare" time has been going into working on my books or contributing to other books.

Enterprise Integration Patterns

Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf
ISBN 0321200683

2003, Addison-Wesley

Enterprise Solution Patterns using Microsoft .NET

David Trowbridge, Gregor Hohpe, James Newkirk, David Lavigne
ISBN 0735618399

2003, Microsoft Press

The Best Software Writing

Joel Spolsky
ISBN 1590595009

2005, APress

Integration Patterns

David Trowbridge, Ulrich Roxburgh, Gregor Hohpe, Dragos Manolescu, E.G. Nadhan
ISBN 073561850X

2004, Microsoft Press

SOA Expertenwissen (in German)

Gernot Starke, Stefan Tilkov (Eds)
ISBN 3898644375

2007, dPunkt Verlag

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

Edited by Richard Monson-Haefel
ISBN 059652269X

2009, O'Reilly

The domain of Enterprise Integration Patterns is much broader than asynchronous messaging. That's why I am trying to collect more Enterprise Integration Patterns, mostly focused on stateful interactions between systems. But it's slow going...

A while ago, I created a number of tools to automate tedious EAI development. My latest tools are StubGen (a code generator for TIBCO AE) and TibDoc (a documentation generation tool). I have also created a messaging toolkit that demonstrates the patterns in my book. I am in the process of open-sourcing it.

When I have a little time I make enhancements to my InfoGate tool -- an e-mail based Web data retrieval tool. I can use it from my cell phone.

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