Enterprise Java

Rube Goldberg Spring Integration

Spring Integration provides a very nice abstraction over some complexities involved with Integrating systems together – Spring Integration fits the definition of a Facade perfectly from an Integration perspective- something that provides a simplified access to a complicated underlying system.

To illustrate this point, consider a simple system, which just takes in a message, and sends it back capitalized, call it the Echo Gateway:

public interface EchoGateway { 
    String echo(String message);
}

and a test for this:

@Test
 public void testEcho() {
  String response = echoGateway.echo('Hello');
  assertThat(response, is('HELLO'));
 }

Sounds simple so far, an implementation using spring integration would take in the ‘message’ and ‘transform’ it by converting to its upper case and returning the enhanced message.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<beans:beans xmlns='http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration'
 xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'
 xmlns:beans='http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans'
 xsi:schemaLocation='
  http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/spring-integration-2.1.xsd
  http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd'>
  
  <channel id='requestChannel'/>
  
  <gateway id='echoGateway' service-interface='rube.simple.EchoGateway' default-request-channel='requestChannel' />
  
  <transformer input-channel='requestChannel' expression='payload.toUpperCase()' />  
  
</beans:beans>

Works beautifully!!

The beauty of Spring Integration is that even if the Integration scenario grows complex, the facade that it presents back to the application continues to remain simple,

Consider a Rube Goldberg integration scenario:

First a diagram to describe the convoluted flow:

So what exactly does it do:

  • It takes in a message of this type – ‘hello from spring integ’,
  • splits it up into individual words(hello, from, spring, integ),
  • sends each word to a ActiveMQ queue,
  • from the queue the word fragments are picked up by a enricher to capitalize each word,
  • placing the response back into a response queue,
  • It is picked up, resequenced based on the original sequence of the words,
  • aggregated back into a sentence(‘HELLO FROM SPRING INTEG’) and
  • returned back to the application.

This is how a Spring Integration configuration for this kind of flow would look like:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<beans:beans xmlns='http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration'
 xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'
 xmlns:int-jms='http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/jms'
 xmlns:beans='http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans'
 xsi:schemaLocation='
  http://www.springframework.org/schema/jms http://www.springframework.org/schema/jms/spring-jms-3.0.xsd
  http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/spring-integration-2.1.xsd
  http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/jms http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/jms/spring-integration-jms-2.1.xsd
  http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd'>
  
  <beans:import resource='broker.xml'/>

  <channel id='requestChannel'>
   <queue/>  
  </channel>
  
  <channel id='responseChannel'>
   <queue/>
  </channel>

  <gateway id='echoGateway' service-interface='rube.complicated.EchoGateway' default-request-channel='requestChannel' default-reply-channel='responseChannel' default-reply-timeout='5000' />
  
  <channel id='toJmsOutbound'/>
  
  <splitter input-channel='requestChannel' output-channel='toJmsOutbound' expression='payload.split('\s')'>
  </splitter>
  
  <channel id='sequenceChannel'>
  </channel>

  <int-jms:outbound-gateway request-channel='toJmsOutbound' reply-channel='sequenceChannel' request-destination='amq.outbound' extract-request-payload='true' />

  <channel id='enhanceMessageChannel'/>
  <channel id='toReplyQueueChannel'/>
  
  <int-jms:inbound-gateway request-channel='enhanceMessageChannel' request-destination='amq.outbound' reply-channel='toReplyQueueChannel'/>

  <transformer input-channel='enhanceMessageChannel' expression='(payload + '').toUpperCase()' output-channel='toReplyQueueChannel'/>
  
  <resequencer input-channel='sequenceChannel' output-channel='aggregateChannel' release-partial-sequences='false'></resequencer>
  
  <aggregator input-channel='aggregateChannel' output-channel='responseChannel'  expression='T(com.google.common.base.Joiner).on(' ').join(![payload].toArray())'/>
  
  <poller id='poller' fixed-delay='500' default='true'/>
  
</beans:beans>

There is so much complexity in this flow(hence the Rube Goldberg), however the facade that Spring Integration provides to the application continues to remain very simple.

@Test
 public void testEcho() throws Exception{
  String amessage = 'Hello from Spring Integration';
  
  String response = echoGateway.echo(amessage);
  assertThat(response, is('HELLO FROM SPRING INTEGRATION'));
 }

This in my mind is the essence of Spring Integration

I have a github repository with this code at https://github.com/bijukunjummen/rg-si.git

Reference: Rube Goldberg Spring Integration from our JCG partner Biju Kunjummen at the all and sundry blog.

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2 Comments
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Gopal
Gopal
10 years ago

Awesome tutorial its helpful for the beginners.
Could you please provide me the broker.xm

Biju Kunjummen
Biju Kunjummen
10 years ago
Reply to  Gopal

Thanks. The entire project is available in github here – https://github.com/bijukunjummen/rg-si. Specifically the broker.xml file is here – https://github.com/bijukunjummen/rg-si/blob/master/src/test/resources/rube/complicated/broker.xml

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