Spring Integration - Enabling the Enterprise Service Cloud

Inversion of Control is a great concept, and the Spring framework excels at it.

Little did I think that Spring could also effect an Inversion of Architecture! I just recently blogged about the need for organisations to move from a hub-and-spokes ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) to its architectural opposite, a federated ESC (Enterprise Service Cloud).

In the hub-and-spokes model, you run an application (a Service) on the ESB. To 'invert' that architecture and make it federated, you need to embed an ESB into your application! Spring Integration allows us to do just that.

This manual provides a number of examples that explain how the tiny, deconstructed pieces of ESB functionality can be injected into an application as required.

That neatly solves the problem of having to deploy multiple heavyweight ESB servers at every endpoint to front-end each application, which would have been the only way to get federation with that heavyweight approach, - a clearly unacceptable solution even if one ignores licence costs.

I used to think that a federated ESB was the answer and that JBI (Java Business Integration) provided the most flexibility to deploy tailored endpoints. (JBI allows one to plug in specific ESB modules into a common "backplane", but Spring Integration goes a step further and uses the application itself as the backplane.)

The future seems to be here already.