During the course of this book, we've covered how to implement enterprise applications. These have been either large monoliths that implemented a lot of components in order to provide a certain set of functionality or microservice-based applications where the application consisted of several small services, all of which worked to provide a certain feature and provide output based on the business's needs by interacting with each other over the network.

But, in any enterprise, there's seldom a case that the application we have developed will be the only application that might be present. Rather, most of the time, the enterprise infrastructure will consist of a number of applications that have been deployed by the enterprise to achieve one or another business need that the enterprise might have. This may include applications facilitating employee record management and customer support management. All of these applications that are present may have been developed internally by the enterprise or could have been taken from a third-party solution provider. To have all of these applications work effectively, there's a requirement for these applications to communicate with each other.

Over the course of this chapter, we'll take a look at how we can achieve this integration between the different applications that exist in the infrastructure, so as to achieve the business needs of the organization.

As a reader of this chapter, you'll get to learn about the following:

• The need for enterprise integration
• Challenges in enterprise integration
• Utilizing middleware for achieving enterprise integration
• The patterns in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)