Enterprise Integration Patterns is a catalog of design patterns for connecting independent software systems through asynchronous messaging. It is best known as the 2003 Addison-Wesley book by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf, and as the companion website Hohpe maintains, which together present a shared vocabulary for the recurring problems of getting disparate applications to exchange data reliably.
The patterns are organized into families that mirror the lifecycle of a message. The website groups them into categories including messaging channels, message construction, message routing, message transformation, messaging endpoints, and systems management, with each pattern documenting a recurring solution such as a message channel that carries messages, a router that directs them, or a translator that converts between formats.
The work grew out of practitioners’ experience with enterprise application integration and message-oriented middleware. As Hohpe’s site notes, it began as a paper at the PLoP 2002 patterns conference before expanding into the full book, which runs to over 700 pages and has sold more than ninety thousand copies, becoming the reference vocabulary for asynchronous messaging solutions.
A central virtue of the catalog is that it is technology-independent. The patterns describe solutions in terms of abstract concepts like channels, endpoints, and routers rather than any single product, so the same vocabulary applies whether the underlying transport is a classic message broker, an enterprise service bus, a cloud messaging service, or a modern event-streaming platform.
That durability is why the patterns remain widely cited decades later. Integration frameworks and messaging libraries are routinely described, and sometimes explicitly modeled, in terms of Enterprise Integration Patterns, giving architects and developers a common language for designing how systems talk to one another through messages.