Chapter 6. Go beyond sequential processing: routing and filtering

Earlier chapters showed you how to use Spring Integration to create an application from a group of processing units. You learned to choose the format of the messages that are exchanged between components, and to define channels to which messages are published and thus propagated through endpoints to the message handlers that process them.

But there’s more to Spring Integration than this basic model. Sure, building an application like this is a simple and efficient (and therefore great) way to reduce coupling. You can also control the responsiveness of the system by adopting an asynchronous model. This works well even for simple, sequential processing models. But this chapter introduces another form of control that goes beyond the conveyor-belt model of sequential processing: it explains how to selectively process messages and define alternative routes within the system.

6.1. Do you want to get this message?

6.2. Whose message is this, anyway?

6.3. Under the hood

6.4. Summary