Part 1. Background

This book will help you to understand and exploit Spring Integration. Part 1 of the book presents a high-level overview of Spring Integration and enterprise integration fundamentals.

Spring Integration provides an extension of the Spring programming model to support the well-known enterprise integration patterns. It enables lightweight messaging within Spring-based applications and supports integration with external systems via declarative adapters. Those adapters provide a higher level of abstraction over Spring’s support for remoting, messaging, and scheduling. Spring Integration’s primary goal is to provide a simple model for building enterprise integration solutions while maintaining the separation of concerns that’s essential for producing maintainable, testable code.

First, in chapter 1, we provide a high-level overview of what Spring Integration is, and show you how its lightweight intra-application messaging can be incorporated into Spring applications, as well as how it offers interapplication integration adapters for use with many external technologies.

Then, in chapter 2, we explain enterprise integration patterns and how they can be represented and implemented by Spring Integration to add common useful capabilities to your Spring applications.