After many months I’ve finally finished reading [Enterprise Integration Patterns](http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/). I wish it had existed when I was working at Syngenta, as it would have thrown light on several of the integration projects I did there. Of course, at the time I didn’t even think of them as Integration-with-an-I projects, but that’s the whole point. At least I can rewrite that part of my CV to be more buzzword compliant now.
I was a bit disappointed that the section on emerging web service standards for messaging was a bit thin on conclusions. It’s certainly not helped me shake the feeling that this morass of standards won’t make a lasting impact, at least not in the way invisaged by their authors.
Another book in the [Addison-Wesley Signature Series](http://www.awprofessional.com/series/series.asp?st=44126) is [Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture](http://www.martinfowler.com/books.html#eaa). I got this for Christmas — yes, I’m that exciting — and it looks to be superb. If I had a list of books for programmers (and that’s a whole other post coming soon) it would be in the section marked “Compulsory” along with things like [Design Patterns](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns).
Tags: programming