Spring support for EAI

Dear authors,

What are the core advantages of using Spring for integration tasks in the EAI domain? What benefits it gives for developers? And what kind of examples the book used to explain these?

Thanks.

Vijitha,

Spring Integration supports all the basic Enterprise Integration Patterns. It leverages the Spring Framework component model freeing the development from dealing with when and where the data comes from and how it does it. The book provides examples of all the Spring Integration components including creating a custom adapter.

Mark

As to the advantages, it depends on what you're comparing it to, I suppose.

Generally, we like to talk about:
- the powerful and rich supply of adapters (everything from JMS and AMQP to workflow support for Activiti, Redis-based pub/sub, and SMS gateway support through SMPP!)
- the lightweight nature of the framework. No startup scripts, no heavy brokers, etc
- the very good integration between Spring and Spring Integration, and between Spring Integration and other Spring sister projects. If you know Spring, then your skills are put to good use in Spring Integration, as it's written by many of the sample people that helped make Spring itself a worldwide success.
- If you're coming from something like Tibco, Axway Integrator, Oracle, etc., then you'll appreciate getting all the power (more even, since now you can see what's going on when something goes wrong!) of those products at open-source prices, too! ;-)

Thanks Mark & Josh, looking forward to use those features