While Spring Boot provides the foundation for creating DevOps friendly microservice applications, other libraries in the Spring ecosystem help create Stream based microservice applications. The most important of these is Spring Cloud Stream.
The essence of the Spring Cloud Stream programming model is to provide an easy way to describe multiple inputs and outputs of an application that communicate over messaging middleware. These input and outputs map onto Kafka topics or Rabbit exchanges and queues. Common application configuration for a Source that generates data, a Process that consumes and produces data and a Sink that consumes data is provided as part of the library.
Spring Cloud Stream is most closely integrated with Spring Integration’s imperative "event at a time" programming model. This means you write code that handles a single event callback. For example,
@EnableBinding(Sink.class) public class LoggingSink { @StreamListener(Sink.INPUT) public void log(String message) { System.out.println(message); } }
In this case the String payload of a message coming on the input channel, is handed to the log method. The @EnableBinding annotation is what is used to tie together the input channel to the external middleware.
However, Spring Cloud Stream can support other programming styles. There is initial support for functional style programming via RxJava Observable APIs and upcoming versions will support callback methods with Project Reactor’s Flux API and Apache Kafka’s KStream API.