Can I use Spring Integration instead of Spring MVC for web application?

Question

I am new bee to Spring Integration framework.

We are developing web application providing mobile based financial services and using Spring MVC to implement it.

We are exposing our services on different channel like REST,SOAP,WEB and providing all these using Spring MVC.

I heard about Spring Integration but did not know very much about , I just know that it is being used to integrate different application easily.

Q - 1 : Is for my requirement, Can I use Spring Integration instead of Spring MVC?

Q - 2 : Is for my requirement, Can I use Spring Web Flow instead of Spring MVC?

Answer 1

If you go to the spring integration page

Spring Integration provides an extension of the Spring programming model to support the well-known Enterprise Integration Patterns. It enables lightweight messaging within Spring-based applications and supports integration with external systems via declarative adapters. Those adapters provide a higher-level of abstraction over Spring's support for remoting, messaging, and scheduling.

So if you are using any of the patterns described above you could put in Spring integration there. You could use spring integration to create a service end point that sends data, but of course your mobile app has to have a client built specifically for consuming that. If you mobile clients pull data from your application when users access the application, to me that is a case of GET request and can be handled by a Controller. You could however for sake of scalability put the communication between controller and business layer through a queue if your system needs that level of distribution; that is where Spring integration will be used.

Regarding Webflow; the simplest way to put it is "If you have a use case where user goes through multiple steps controlled by different screens, yes you can put it on Spring Webflow".

None of the them replace each other though.