Explain how the loose coupling inherent in message queues can aid with Enterprise Application Integration. Consider to what extent this can be traced to time uncoupling, space uncoupling or a combination of both.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Enterprise Application Integration is concerned with providing an integration framework for linking separately deployed services within an organisation, for example student record systems, financial systems and virtual learning environments within a university. These are independently developed and deployed systems that are not necessarily designed to talk to each other. In this context, message queues provide a level of indirection where services do not need to communicate directly with each other but can communicate through message queues. This is important as such services do not know about each other. Different topologies of interconnection can also be implemented using the message queue framework with this framework then providing the required coordination logic across the services.
The key property here is space uncoupling, that is not needing to know the identity of the recipient. Time uncoupling is not an important requirement as we can assume that such services are generally available all the time.