title: Spring Integration - Inbound vs Outbound Channel Adapters
body: <p><strong>What is the fundamental difference between inbound and outbound channel adapters?</strong>  </p>
  
  <p>Any examples would be very helpful.</p>
  
  <p>I have reviewed the Spring docs and this "directional" distinction is not clear to me.  I support an application that has an outbound-channel-adapter configured, but I find the behavior counter intuitive with the <em>outbound</em> label.  This adapter gets an external file, then <em>brings it in</em> to the application where we parse the file and persist the data.</p>
  
  <p>This is similar to <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22216293/spring-ftp-inbound-vs-outbound-channel-adaptor">this</a> question, but I wanted to focus more generally on channel adapters, and hopefully get more feedback!</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>