concept event - drive architecture in category java

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Spring Integration in Action. Login to get full access to this book.

Event-driven architecture (EDA) is an architectural pattern in which complex applications are broken down into a set of components or services that interact via events. One of the primary advantages of this approach is that it simplifies the implementation of the component by eliminating the concern of how to communicate with other components. Where events are communicated via channels that can act as buffers in periods of high throughput, such a system can be described as having a staged event-driven architecture (SEDA). SEDA-based systems generally respond better to significant spikes in load than do standard multithreaded applications and are also easier to configure at runtime, for example, by modifying the number of consumers processing a certain event type. This allows for optimizations based on the actual requirements of the application, which in turn provides a better usage experience.

In this section we argue why loose coupling is preferable over tight coupling in almost every situation. Because coupling can come in different forms, such as type-level or system-level, we explore these variants of coupling in more detail. The last part of the section discusses how to reduce coupling in your application by using dependency injection or adopting an event-driven architecture.