You can now use SpEL expressions within the transformer, router, filter, splitter, aggregator, service-activator, header-enricher, and many more elements of the Spring Integration core namespace as well as various adapters. There are many samples provided throughout this manual.

You can now benefit from Conversion Service support provided with Spring while configuring many Spring Integration components such as Datatype Channel. See Section 3.1.2, “Message Channel Implementations” as well Section 7.3.1, “Introduction”. Also, the SpEL support mentioned in the previous point also relies upon the ConversionService. Therefore, you can register Converters once, and take advantage of them anywhere you are using SpEL expressions.

Spring 3.0 defines two new strategies related to scheduling: TaskScheduler and Trigger Spring Integration (which uses a lot of scheduling) now builds upon these. In fact, Spring Integration 1.0 had originally defined some of the components (e.g. CronTrigger) that have now been migrated into Spring 3.0's core API. Now, you can benefit from reusing the same components within the entire Application Context (not just Spring Integration configuration). Configuration of Spring Integration Pollers has been greatly simplified as well by providing attributes for directly configuring rates, delays, cron expressions, and trigger references. See Section 3.3, “Channel Adapter” for sample configurations.

Our outbound HTTP adapters now delegate to Spring's RestTemplate for executing the HTTP request and handling its response. This also means that you can reuse any custom HttpMessageConverter implementations. See Section 16.3, “Http Outbound Gateway” for more details.

We now provide support for the Message History pattern allowing you to keep track of all traversed components, including the name of each channel and endpoint as well as the timestamp of that traversal. See Section 8.2, “Message History” for more details.

We now provide support for the Message Store pattern. The Message Store provides a strategy for persisting messages on behalf of any process whose scope extends beyond a single transaction, such as the Aggregator and Resequencer. Many sections of this document provide samples on how to use a Message Store as it affects several areas of Spring Integration. See Section 8.3, “Message Store”, Section 6.3, “Claim Check”, Section 3.1, “Message Channels”, Section 5.4, “Aggregator”, Chapter 17, JDBC Support, and Section 5.5, “Resequencer” for more details

We have added an implementation of the Claim Check pattern. The idea behind the Claim Check pattern is that you can exchange a Message payload for a "claim ticket" and vice-versa. This allows you to reduce bandwidth and/or avoid potential security issues when sending Messages across channels. See Section 6.3, “Claim Check” for more details.

We have provided implementations of the Control Bus pattern which allows you to use messaging to manage and monitor endpoints and channels. The implementations include both a SpEL-based approach and one that executes Groovy scripts. See Section 8.5, “Control Bus” and Section 7.6.2, “Control Bus” for more details.

We have added Channel Adapters for receiving and sending messages over the TCP and UDP internet protocols. See Chapter 28, TCP and UDP Support for more details. Also, you can checkout the following blog: TCP/UDP support

Twitter adapters provides support for sending and receiving Twitter Status updates as well as Direct Messages. You can also perform Twitter Searches with an inbound Channel Adapter. See Chapter 29, Twitter Adapter for more details.

The new XMPP adapters support both Chat Messages and Presence events. See Chapter 32, XMPP Support for more details.

Inbound and outbound File transfer support over FTP/FTPS is now available. See Chapter 14, FTP/FTPS Adapters for more details.

Inbound and outbound File transfer support over SFTP is now available. See Chapter 25, SFTP Adapters for more details.

We have also added Channel Adapters for receiving news feeds (ATOM/RSS). See Chapter 12, Feed Adapter for more details.

With Spring Integration 2.0 we've added Groovy support allowing you to use Groovy scripting language to provide integration and/or business logic. See Section 7.6, “Groovy support” for more details.

These symmetrical transformers convert payload objects to and from a Map. See Section 6.1, “Transformer” for more details.

These symmetrical transformers convert payload objects to and from JSON. See Section 6.1, “Transformer” for more details.

These symmetrical transformers convert payload objects to and from byte arrays. They also support the Serializer and Deserializer strategy interfaces that have been added as of Spring 3.0.5. See Section 6.1, “Transformer” for more details.

In Spring Integration 2.0, support for Groovy was added. With Spring Integration 2.1 we expanded support for additional languages substantially by implementing support for JSR-223 (Scripting for the Java™ Platform). Now you have the ability to use any scripting language that supports JSR-223 including:

For further details please see Section 7.5, “Scripting support”.

Spring Integration provides support for GemFire by providing inbound adapters for entry and continuous query events, an outbound adapter to write entries to the cache, and MessageStore and MessageGroupStore implementations. Spring integration leverages the Spring Gemfire project, providing a thin wrapper over its components.

For further details please see Chapter 15, GemFire Support.

Spring Integration 2.1 adds several Channel Adapters for receiving and sending messages using the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). Furthermore, Spring Integration also provides a point-to-point Message Channel, as well as a publish/subscribe Message Channel that are backed by AMQP Exchanges and Queues.

For further details please see Chapter 10, AMQP Support.

As of version 2.1 Spring Integration provides support for MongoDB by providing a MongoDB-based MessageStore.

For further details please see Chapter 21, MongoDb Support.

As of version 2.1 Spring Integration supports Redis, an advanced key-value store, by providing a Redis-based MessageStore as well as Publish-Subscribe Messaging adapters.

For further details please see Chapter 22, Redis Support.

As of version 2.1, we've introduced a new Resource Inbound Channel Adapter that builds upon Spring's Resource abstraction to support greater flexibility across a variety of actual types of underlying resources, such as a file, a URL, or a class path resource. Therefore, it's similar to but more generic than the File Inbound Channel Adapter.

For further details please see Section 23.2, “Resource Inbound Channel Adapter”.

With Spring Integration 2.1, the JDBC Module also provides Stored Procedure support by adding several new components, including inbound/outbound channel adapters and an Outbound Gateway. The Stored Procedure support leverages Spring's SimpleJdbcCall class and consequently supports stored procedures for:

The Stored Procedure components also support Sql Functions for the following databases:

For further details please see Section 17.5, “Stored Procedures”.

Spring Integration 2.1 provides a new XPath-based Message Filter, that is part of the XML module. The XPath Filter allows you to filter messages using provided XPath Expressions. Furthermore, documentation was added for the XML Validating Filter.

For more details please see Section 31.8, “Using the XPath Filter” and Section 31.10, “XML Validating Filter”.

Since Spring Integration 2.1, the Payload Enricher is provided. A Payload Enricher defines an endpoint that typically passes a Message to the exposed request channel and then expects a reply message. The reply message then becomes the root object for evaluation of expressions to enrich the target payload.

For further details please see Section 6.2.3, “Payload Enricher”.

Spring Integration 2.1 provides two new Outbound Gateways in order to interact with remote File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFT) servers. These two gateways allow you to directly execute a limited set of remote commands.

For instance, you can use these Outbound Gateways to list, retrieve and delete remote files and have the Spring Integration message flow continue with the remote server's response.

For further details please see Section 14.5, “FTP Outbound Gateway” and Section 25.7, “SFTP Outbound Gateway”.

As of version 2.1, we have exposed more flexibility with regards to session management for remote file adapters (e.g., FTP, SFTP etc).

Specifically, the cache-sessions attribute, which is available via the XML namespace support, is now deprecated. Alternatively, we added the sessionCacheSize and sessionWaitTimeout attributes on the CachingSessionFactory.

For further details please see Section 14.6, “FTP Session Caching” and Section 25.3, “SFTP Session Caching”.

Router parameters have been standardized across all router implementations with Spring Integration 2.1 providing a more consistent user experience.

With Spring Integration 2.1 the ignore-channel-name-resolution-failures attribute has been removed in favor of consolidating its behavior with the resolution-required attribute. Also, the resolution-required attribute now defaults to true.

Starting with Spring Integration 2.1, routers will no longer silently drop any messages, if no default output channel was defined. This means, that by default routers now require at least one resolved channel (if no default-output-channel was set) and by default will throw a MessageDeliveryException if no channel was determined (or an attempt to send was not successful).

If, however, you do desire to drop messages silently, simply set default-output-channel="nullChannel".

For further details please see Section 5.1, “Routers”

Spring Integration 2.1 ships with an updated XML Schema (version 2.1), providing many improvements, e.g. the Router standardizations discussed above.

From now on, users must always declare the latest XML schema (currently version 2.1). Alternatively, they can use the version-less schema. Generally, the best option is to use version-less namespaces, as these will automatically use the latest available version of Spring Integration.

Declaring a version-less Spring Integration namespace:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xmlns:int="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration"
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/spring-integration.xsd
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">
...
</beans>

Declaring a Spring Integration namespace using an explicit version:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xmlns:int="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration"
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/spring-integration-2.2.xsd
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">
...
</beans>

The old 1.0 and 2.0 schemas are still there, but if an Application Context still references one of those deprecated schemas, the validator will fail on initialization.

Since version 2.0, the Spring Integration project uses Git for version control. In order to increase community visibility even further, the project was moved from SpringSource hosted Git repositories to Github. The Spring Integration Git repository is located at: https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-integration/

For the project we also improved the process of providing code contributions and we ensure that every commit is peer-reviewed. In fact, core committers now follow the same process as contributors. For more details please see:

https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-integration/wiki/Contributor-Guidelines

In an effort to provide better source code visibility and consequently to monitor the quality of Spring Integration's source code, an instance of Sonar was setup and metrics are gathered nightly and made avaiblable at:

https://sonar.springsource.org/

Spring Integration now has RedisStore Inbound and Outbound Channel Adapters allowing you to write and read Message payloads to/from Redis collection(s). For more information please see Section 22.7, “RedisStore Outbound Channel Adapter” and Section 22.6, “RedisStore Inbound Channel Adapter”.

Spring Integration now has MongoDB Inbound and Outbound Channel Adapters allowing you to write and read Message payloads to/from a MongoDB document store. For more information please see Section 21.5, “MongoDB Outbound Channel Adapter” and Section 21.4, “MongoDB Inbound Channel Adapter”.

Spring Integration now includes components for the Java Persistence API (JPA) for retrieving and persisting JPA entity objects. The JPA Adapter includes the following components:

For more information please see Chapter 18, JPA Support

Spring Integration now uses Spring 3.1.

The ability to add an <advice-chain/> to a poller has been available for some time. However, the behavior added by this affects the entire integration flow. It did not address the ability to add, say, retry, to an individual endpoint. The 2.2. release introduces the <request-handler-advice-chain/> to many endpoints.

In addition, 3 standard Advice classes have been provided for this purpose:

For more information, see Section 7.7, “Adding Behavior to Endpoints”.

Pollers can now participate in Spring's Transaction Synchronization feature. This allows for synchronizing such operations as renaming files by an inbound channel adapter depending on whether the transaction commits, or rolls back.

In addition, these features can be enabled when there is not a 'real' transaction present, by means of a PseudoTransactionManager.

For more information see Section C.3, “Transaction Synchronization”.

When using the File Oubound Channel Adapter or the File Outbound Gateway, a new mode property was added. Prior to Spring Integration 2.2, target files were replaced when they existed. Now you can specify the following options:

For more information please see Section 13.3.3, “Dealing with Existing Destination Files”.

The XML Namespace support adds the reply-timeout attribute to the following Outbound Gateways:

Spring Integration now uses Spring AMQP 1.1. This enables several features to be used within a Spring Integration application, including...

SpEL Support

When using the Stored Procedure components of the Spring Integration JDBC Adapter, you can now provide Stored Procedure Names or Stored Function Names using Spring Expression Language (SpEL).

This allows you to specify the Stored Procedures to be invoked at runtime. For example, you can provide Stored Procedure names that you would like to execute via Message Headers. For more information please see Section 17.5, “Stored Procedures”.

JMX Support

The Stored Procedure components now provide basic JMX support, exposing some of their properties as MBeans:

When using the JDBC Outbound Gateway, the update query is no longer mandatory. You can now provide solely a select query using the request message as a source of parameters.

A new Message Channel-specific Message Store Implementation has been added, providing a more scalable solution using database-specific SQL queries. For more information please see: Section 17.4.2, “Backing Message Channels”.

A method stopActiveComponents() has been added to the IntegrationMBeanExporter. This allows a Spring Integration application to be shut down in an orderly manner, disallowing new inbound messages to certain adapters and waiting for some time to allow in-flight messages to complete.

The JMS Outbound Gateway can now be configured to use a MessageListener container to receive replies. This can improve performance of the gateway.

The ObjectToJsonTransformer now sets the content-type header to application/json by default. For more information see Section 6.1, “Transformer”.

Java serialization over HTTP is no longer enabled by default. Previously, when setting a expected-response-type to a Serializable object, the Accept header was not properly set up. The SerializingHttpMessageConverter has now been updated to set the Accept header to application/x-java-serialized-object. However, because this could cause incompatibility with existing applications, it was decided to no longer automatically add this converter to the HTTP endpoints.

If you wish to use Java serialization, you will need to add the SerializingHttpMessageConverter to the appropriate endpoints, using the message-converters attribute, when using XML configuration, or using the setMessageConverters() method.

Alternatively, you may wish to consider using JSON instead which is enabled by simply having Jackson on the classpath.