Pragmatic - Enterprise Integration With Ruby

Introduction

Have you ever worked for a big enterprise? Do you remember your expectations as you walked into work on that first day? Whistling as the sun shone brightly, you might have been thinking “It will be great to work for <company name here>. They will have a professional environment, where coffee is free, where every system has been specified accurately, implemented carefully, and tested thoroughly. Hmmmm... I wonder which database and programming language they use.”

After your fifth cup of free coffee (around 9:07) you came to realize that the real world looks completely different from your expectations. Typical enterprises use dozens, hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of applications, components, services, and databases. Many of them were custom-built in-house or by third parties, some were bought, others are based on Open Source projects, and the origin of a few—usually the most critical ones—is completely unknown. A lot of applications are very old, some are fairly new and seemingly no two of them were written using the same tools. They run on heterogeneous operating systems and hardware, they use databases and messaging systems from various vendors, they were written in different programming languages.