I'm tasked with the requirement of using Spring Cloud Stream (with Kafka bindings). Going through Spring Cloud Stream's Quick Start and judging from the Config file it uses, LogSinkConfiguration, it seems the recommendation here is to use Spring Integration patterns, e.g. @ServiceActivator(inputChannel = Sink.INPUT) to connect to the input channel. However all the tutorials I've found are using a different set of annotations from the Spring Cloud Stream library (vs Spring Integration), i.e. @StreamListener(Processor.INPUT) in this walk-through.
So which is better/newer/preferred (i.e. what's the "best practice"). Should I use the S.I. way of configuring the sink using @ServiceActivator(inputChannel = Sink.INPUT) or the alternative @StreamListener(Processor.INPUT). Are these two methods of hooking up the sink virtually the same, or are there advantages to using one over the other?
With 2.0 we introduced spring-cloud-function support and with the imminent release of 3.0 we are now fully committed to functional support over any annotation driven (Spring Integration included).
So, to answer your question, functional support is the preferred way. Here is the link to more info and feel free to follow up with more concrete questions.