Spring Cloud Stream is a framework for building message-driven microservice applications. Spring Cloud Stream builds upon Spring Boot to create standalone, production-grade Spring applications, and uses Spring Integration to provide connectivity to message brokers. It provides opinionated configuration of middleware from several vendors, introducing the concepts of persistent publish-subscribe semantics, consumer groups, and partitions.

You can add the @EnableBinding annotation to your application to get immediate connectivity to a message broker, and you can add @StreamListener to a method to cause it to receive events for stream processing. The following is a simple sink application which receives external messages.

@SpringBootApplication
public class StreamApplication {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(StreamApplication.class, args);
  }
}

@EnableBinding(Sink.class)
public class TimerSource {

  ...

  @StreamListener(Sink.INPUT)
  public void processVote(Vote vote) {
      votingService.recordVote(vote);
  }
}

The @EnableBinding annotation takes one or more interfaces as parameters (in this case, the parameter is a single Sink interface). An interface declares input and/or output channels. Spring Cloud Stream provides the interfaces Source, Sink, and Processor; you can also define your own interfaces.

The following is the definition of the Source interface:

public interface Sink {
  String INPUT = "input";

  @Input(Sink.INPUT)
  SubscribableChannel input();
}

The @Input annotation identifies an input channel, through which received messages enter the application; the @Output annotation identifies an output channel, through which published messages leave the application. The @Input and @Output annotations can take a channel name as a parameter; if a name is not provided, the name of the annotated method will be used.

Spring Cloud Stream will create an implementation of the interface for you. You can use this in the application by autowiring it, as in the following example of a test case.

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@SpringApplicationConfiguration(classes = StreamApplication.class)
@WebAppConfiguration
@DirtiesContext
public class StreamApplicationTests {

  @Autowired
  private Sink sink;

  @Test
  public void contextLoads() {
    assertNotNull(this.sink.input());
  }
}