Why Spring Integration?

Spring Integration is an open source effort to address integration challenges; it is based on the Spring Framework, which is the most widely used Java-based framework in organizations. It introduces the simple POJO-based programming model to support standard integration patterns.

It's lightweight; all it needs is couple of jars for which Maven targets are readily available. A quick comparison shows that the Service Mix download is around 55 MB while Spring Integration is just 14 MB in size.

For enterprises that are already using Java and Spring, it eases the integration effort as it follows the same idioms and patterns of the Spring Framework.