Extending Spring Integration

Abstract

The Spring Integration framework provides an extensive toolbox for integration problems. Spring Integration 2.0 ships with many new adapters, and lays the groundwork for many other adapters to come. The adapter support is also often very generic, providing support for a broad spectrum of concerns. For example, while the Twitter adapters speak specifically to Twitter and are considered very specific, the TCP/UDP support can speak to any system that speaks TCP or UDP, and the HTTP adapter can speak to any HTTP endpoint. In a sense, the TCP/UDP support is much broader than the HTTP support. If there is a problem that cannot be fixed with the HTTP support and feels like it can be tackled using raw TCP/UDP, then that is a viable route. In the other direction, Spring Integration also provides first-class support for SOAP-based web services, which can be thought of as a specialization of HTTP support. Spring Integration ships with SOAP support because SOAP as a protocol and specification exposes well-known request and response-specific payloads, and is used by many people. Wherever Spring Integration can provide specific, ready-to-use support for a system or protocol, it does. It is helpful to know that while some systems may lack specific support, there are more generic options.