Spring Integration in Action

Spring Integration in Action
Source code: www.manning.com/SpringIntegrationinAction
A message is passed through a channel from one endpoint to another endpoint.
A message consists of a single payload and zero or more headers.
The channel implementation manages the details of how and where a message is delivered but
shouldn’t need to interact with the payload of a message.
Two endpoints can exchange messages only if they’re connected through a channel.
Channels can be categorized based on two dimensions: type of handoff and type of
delivery. The handoff can be either synchronous or asynchronous, and the delivery
can be either point-to-point or publish-subscribe.
Connections to the application or the outside world are also endpoints, and these connections take
the form of channel adapters, messaging gateways, or service activators.
A Channel Adapter connects an application to the messaging system.
In Spring Integration, a Messaging Gateway iss a connection that’s specific to bidirectional messaging.
A Service Activator is a component that invokes a service based on an
incoming message and sends an outbound message based on the return value of this service invocation.

The main idea behind IoC and the Spring Framework itself is that code should be
as simple as possible while still supporting all of the complex requirements of enterprise
applications. To accomplish that goal, the responsibility of controlling those complexities should be
inverted from the application code to a framework.