About This Book
At its core, Spring Integration defines an API for messaging and a corresponding data model. The abstraction provided by that API and model essentially serves as a lightweight messaging framework that can be used in any runtime environment from a full-blown application server to a simple main method within a Java class that’s executed from a command line or within an IDE.
A messaging framework can be quite useful even in standalone applications that don’t require complex system integration. For example, the core enterprise integration patterns can be used to construct a pipeline of filters, transformers, and routers that all run within a single process. With the growing interest in asynchronous event-driven applications, that pipeline design might be a good match for many of your applications.