Pro Spring Integration - Is it right to start with Spring?

[Oriol Boan]

Hello,
I have done development in some enterprise projects using struts & JSF but never still worked with Spring, and I'm willing to learn Spring, so... is this book suitable for a profile like mine? What is the intended audience this book was written for? Thank you!

[Mark Lui]

Oriol,

Pro Spring Integration is about the Spring Integration Project - the integration and messaging extensions to the Spring Framework. We provide a quick introduction to the Spring Framework in the book. For more in depth information about the Spring Framework I would suggest Spring Recipes.

Mark

[Oriol Boan]

Thank you Mark.

You said "...is about the Spring Integration Project", thus I looked for information on this subject to determine whether I could be interested or not, and as usually there is a bunch of info, which, plus the fact that I am really very busy, it makes me hard to find out if I should start learning enterprise integrations with the solutions provided within this project (the Spring Integration Project) or better choose other approaches as an ESB.

Please, could you summarize the main goals of this project and the main differences with an ESB solution (if apply)? Maybe ESB is more generic and Spring Integration Project is intended only for integrations where applications are built using the Spring framework? Is the Spring Integration an approach more like the classical EAI? I'm a bit lost...

Thank you again.

[Mark Lui]

Oriol,

Spring Integration adds lightweight messaging and support for integrating with external systems and services via an adapter framework. Spring Integration comes with a number of out of the box adapters including support for integration with applications outside of the Spring framework. The approach is much like the standard EAI broker/adapter architecture. I would definitely recommend Spring Integration for learning enterprise integration.

Mark

[Oriol Boan]

Thanks Mark. Your answer clarifies me what is this book and this Spring Integration Project about, which is what I needed to know.

I would definitely recommend Spring Integration for learning enterprise integration.

I will take into account very seriously this recommendation, besides the Spring Recipes book you suggested. I think it's time for me to add all Spring technologies to my personal knowledge database and to improve my professional career. Thanks you again.

[Josh X Long]

Btw, when you think of Spring Integration, think of lightweight integration frameworks. An ESB by its very definition mandates a central server through which everything flows. Spring Integration is not a server, it has no startup scripts, no requirements on infrastructure, etc. If you want to provide integration support in your web application but don't want to deploy a whole new broker, that's easy. If you want to deploy an application that handes integration between two systems, then you can do that, too. Spring Integration makes no prescription about where it's run or how. It's just an API with libraries that implement support for connecting to, and sending and receiving events from, external systems. I like to think of Spring Integration as the first member of the fledgling NoESB movement ;-)

[Josh X Long]

And, yes, if you're looking for a general purpose introduction to all the numerous Spring projects, then check out Spring Recipes, 2nd Edition, also from Apress. If you're looking for a good book on Enterprise Integration, check out Pro Spring Integration. I like to tell people to check out the Green Beans posts on SpringSource's blog to get started with this stuff. They don't cover everything, by any stretch, so you'll find having the books an invaluable resource, but they do help you take your first steps and understand which projects do what, and how, and why, at a super introductory level. http://blog.springsource.com/category/green-beans/

[Oriol Boan]

Lots of thanks, Josh!

Your comments are very valuable.

It's just an API with libraries that implement support for connecting to, and sending and receiving events from, external systems.

So it can be used to integrate external systems, no matter what framework is used on these external systems, therefore Spring Integration is not only addressed to applications / systems built using the Spring framework, you can use Spring integration to integrate any kind of external systems. That's very good! (I supossed it has to be this way to guarantee its successfulness, but you never know for sure what policies rule over a project). I agree with your recommendations about learning and using Spring Integration. Green Beans already added in my bookmarks list. Thanks again.