Pattern-Based Resolution of Integration Mismatches in Enterprise Applications

Modern applications integrate various heterogeneous software services, typically based on Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs). At the same time, such applications can include hundreds of interacting components, being these services or EIPs. This makes it complex to manually check whether the typed messages sent by a component to another are such that the latter can understand and suitably process them. We propose a design-time methodology for automatically identifying type mismatches in the messages exchanged among services and EIPs in a multi-service application. Our methodology also recommends how to refactor the architecture of a multi-service application to resolve the type mismatches therein. We assess the practical applicability of our methodology by presenting a proof-of-concept implementation, which we used to run a case study based on an existing, third-party application.