Services-Based Enterprise Integration Patterns Made Easy, Part 1: The Evolution of Basic Concepts

This series of papers explains services-based enterprise integration patterns in an easy-to-understand, step-by-step way. In this installment, Part 1 of the series, one learns about the two earliest integration patterns - data sharing only and Remote Procedure Call (RPC) - which help introduce the concepts of service provider and service consumer, platform independence, and connectivity. Exploring RPC helps one get familiar with the basic steps necessary for two applications to share functionality. This paper also includes a general description of the concepts of loose coupling, code reuse, and layering and componentization. Part 2 of the series will continue the discussion of the early patterns, while Parts 3 and 4 cover the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based integration patterns, including examples.