Make sure you didn't miss anything with this list of the Best of the Week in the Enterprise Integration Zone (Mar. 14 to Mar. 20). Here they are, in order of popularity:

1. Spring Integration Standalone Application with Spring Boot

I had earlier blogged about a way to write a standalone Spring Integration application. Spring Boot makes creating this standalone application much simpler. The simple flow was to poll the USGS service providing information about the earthquake activity around the world and to log this information.

2. The Optional Type API

Java 8 introduces the Optional class. In a nutshell, instead of returning null, and then checking for null, you return an Optional instance, which can either have or not have a value set. That way you don’t fail with NullPointerException.

3. WebSockets with Spring 4

I am throwing the entire kitchen sink into a small web application that I am developing as part of this post - Spring Boot, Spring Integration, RabbitMQ and finally the topic of the post, the Websocket support in Spring MVC with Spring 4.

4. Riding the API Economy Wave

As we make final preparations for APIStrat Amsterdam 2014 we’re thinking about how the conference has changed and grown in just one year. Our inaugural event in New York was attended by 350 API providers, and the service providers who support them.

5. How to Create a Dynamic HTTP Proxy with Mule

In this post I will show a proof-of-concept for a dynamic HTTP proxy implemented using Mule. The proxy forwards HTTP request using the context and relative path parts of the request URL to determine the server and port to which the request is to be forwarded.