Spring Integration : Multiple Application Integration using Spring Integration

Question

I have some doubts regarding Spring Integration :

1. Can we integrate more than two applications using Spring Integration framework?

2. Is it point to point intergration or middleware oriented integration?

3. In client-server architecture If both (client & server) are java based applications, then what should we use for synchronous communication ? means, should we go for Spring Integration or JAX-RPC ? Which one will be faster for synchronous communication ?

Answer 1

Spring Integration is a lightweight integration framework. It does not use or need a central broker (many see that as a benefit).

It is not just point to point; you can configure a many-to-many environment, but no broker is required. You can, of course, use a middleware broker if you wish (e.g. RabbitMQ or JMS).

There are many ways to perform synchronous (request/reply) integration. In Spring Integration, the components usually used for that are called gateways (outbound on the client, inbound on the server).

One of the benefits of this is the application doesn't have to know what technique is being used. With simple configuration changes, you can change the actual protocol used to whatever you want, with zero changes to the application itself.

Many techniques are provided out of the box, including ReST (http), SOAP WebServices, JMS, AMQP, TCP/IP, ...).

It's best not to think of synchronous integration as RPC - it's all about loose coupling using request/response messaging, with the message content being the contract, not the API.

One-way integration is achieved using channel-adapters rather than gateways.

I suggest you take a look at the reference documentation... http://static.springsource.org/spring-integration/reference/html/