The first part of this two-part session will focus on the essentials of Enterprise Integration with Spring. The discussion will cover the enterprise integration support libraries in the Spring Framework core within the context of well-established design principles such as loose coupling and separation of concerns.

The presentation is driven by examples that progressively extend an application with various integration capabilities such as remoting, messaging, scheduling, and management. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of Spring's core integration support and an appreciation for the benefits of using Spring's dependency injection, templates, and proxies. After this session, you will be fully prepared to explore Spring Integration, a new addition to the Spring portfolio, in Part 2.

The second part of this two-part session will introduce Spring Integration, a new addition to the Spring portfolio. We will begin with a high-level overview of Enterprise Integration Patterns as catalogued in the highly influential book of the same name. We will then embark on a demo-driven exploration of Spring Integration to see how it enables the development of applications based on those patterns.

Patterns we will discuss include Message Channel, Channel Adapter, Message Endpoint, Content-Based Router, Message Translator, and more. We will also take an in-depth look at the APIs so that you will understand how to provide extensions while maintaining the separation of concerns that is essential for producing maintainable, testable code.

In this session, we will take a deep-dive into annotation-based dependency injection with Spring 2.5. You will learn how to combine annotation and XML formats, how to customize component scanning, and how to leverage Java 6 annotations within a Spring application. Since there is no "one size fits all" solution to application configuration, we will wrap up the discussion with general guidelines to consider when employing this approach.

Although XML is the most widely used format for Spring configuration, other options do exist including properties files, Spring's Java Configuration, and even Groovy builders. Spring 2.5 adds to this mix with support for Java's @Resource annotation and Spring's @Autowired annotation. Spring 2.5 also supports classpath scanning for Spring components. This session will provide a comprehensive overview of these new Spring 2.5 features for annotation-based configuration.