@Gateway is not required if we use @MessagingGateway

Question

From Spring 4.0 onwards @MessagingGateway was introdued. Using it if we have only one gateway method in our Gateway interface , then we don't need to annotate the Gateway method with @Gateway. Below is my example, where both are working.

So, my question is can we stop using @Gateway when we have only one method in Gateway interface?

Code-1:

@MessagingGateway(name="demoGateway")
public interface DemoGateway {
    @Gateway(requestChannel = "gatewayRequestChannel",replyChannel = "nullChannel")
    void accept(Message<String> request);
}

Code-2:

@MessagingGateway(name="demoGateway",defaultRequestChannel = 
"gatewayRequestChannel",defaultReplyChannel = "nullChannel")
public interface DemoGateway {

    void accept(Message<String> request);
}

Answer 1

Yes. You are right. You can do approach 2 and leave the single method that confirms to the default configuration of @MessagingGateway without annotation.

However in practice, I will only move the truly default values to the MessagingGateway and leave other values to @Gateway annotation.

This is because it makes life and readability easier in the future if you have to add more methods to DemoGateway in the future.