Channel Adapters are the components responsible for interacting with external systems or other components that are external to the messaging system. As the name implies, the interaction consists of adapting the external system or component to send-to and/or receive-from a MessageChannel. Within Spring Integration, there is a distinction between source adapters and target adapters. In the 1.0 Milestone 3 release, Spring Integration includes source and target adapters for JMS, RMI, Files, Streams, Spring's HttpInvoker and Spring ApplicationEvents. A source adapter for FTP is also available as well as target adapters for sending e-mail and invoking Web Services.

All of these adapters are discussed in this section. However, namespace support is provided for many of them and is typically the most convenient option for configuration. For examples, see the section called “Configuring Channel Adapters”.