Book Review: Spring Integration in Action

Spring Integration in Action

Finally I have gotten some time to spend on Spring Integration and started by reading Spring Integration in Action MEAP Edition version 7. It is the first time that I am reading a MEAP Edition so will not be able to accurately compare the book, however, from my point of view, it is already in pretty good shape and the mistakes where minimal.

This book is great for anybody who wants to start delving in the world of integration. The book isn't simply a list of recipes of things you can do with Spring Integration but rather discuss the integration issues in their own right and then describe how you would do it using Spring Integration. The first two parts are quite heavy on theory which is great for beginners however developers who have been doing integration with other tools might want to skim through these chapters and look at the labs. I was quite happy to see the discussion of transaction boundaries discussed as early as Chapter 3 since it is a topic which I feel is sometimes ignored.

The third part starts with a discussion about splitting and aggregating messages then focused more on the different transports. The most interesting part here is the file based collaborative trip diary editor which is described in this section. This lab describes how you can have a collaborative text editor by writing “diffs” to the file system and have multiple clients writing to the same directory and thus working on the same file concurrently.

Personally I found the final part quite interesting. Well, to be honest, I was a bit confused why the chapter about twitter and chatting was not placed in the previous part, but apart from that, the rest is great. I loved the introduction to Spring Batch and the discussion on OSGI & scaling up applications. Something which I found surprising was how easy it is in Spring Integration to monitor the message path. The testing chapter is also quite interesting but I would have moved it earlier in the book since it can help with understanding and explaining.

All in all, this is a great book and can't wait to get the final version. I give this book a score of 4 out of 5 but has the potential to be 5 out of 5 once it is ready.