The Spring Framework is a popular application framework for Java Enterprise applications. Best known is its mechanism of "Inversion of control" or dependency injection. But the Spring Framework comes with many other features. Typically, Spring will define a clean set of interfaces and implementations on top of existing Java constructs.
Now, Spring is also popular in the world of integration: most open source ESB's - Mule, ServiceMix - are based on the Spring Framework. Recently Spring came up with its own "Spring Integration" sub-project. Although still in beta, this doesn't seem like a standard ESB. Rather, Spring Integration is more focused on integration "within" the application. Separating the integration logic from the business logic, but keeping it within the application itself. As such, one gets integration at the edges. In line with the Spring Framework itself, Spring Integration is obviously Java oriented, e.g. the Message object has a Java object as payload. It does not make any assumptions about payload format, XML or other. Spring Integration takes the Enterprise Integration Patterns book as a starting point, and that is something it does have in common with the many open source ESB's.
Another interesting sub-project is Spring Batch. This framework is focused on processing large data sets whereby the processing is split into multiple transactions and progress of batch jobs is maintained in database tables. This tool also comes with adapters and message conversion, but from a completely different angle.
Interesting to watch how the Spring team will grow these projects, along with Spring-WS and their upcoming REST implementation.
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