When would you use Spring application events instead of durable messaging?

Separates in-process decoupling from durable cross-process delivery and makes timing, failure, and transaction expectations explicit.

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I use a Spring application event when publishers and listeners live in the same application and losing the event with the process is acceptable. By default, event listeners run synchronously in the publishing thread, so their failure and latency can affect the publisher. I use durable messaging when work must survive restart, cross a service boundary, be retried independently, or support replay and operational ownership.

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ApplicationEventPublisher, synchronous listeners, async listeners, process lifetime, delivery guarantees, coupling, and contracts.

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Spring application events decouple code inside one process; they are not a durable integration channel by default.
I use a Spring application event when publishers and listeners live in the same application and losing the event with the process is acceptable. By default, event listeners run synchronously in the publishing thread, so their failure and latency can affect the publisher. I use durable messaging when work must survive restart, cross a service boundary, be retried independently, or support replay and operational ownership.
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Making an event listener asynchronous changes execution but still does not make delivery durable. In-process events are useful for secondary local reactions such as updating an internal projection or clearing a local cache, provided the consistency expectation is explicit. A message has a versioned contract, idempotent consumer, retention and retry policy, and observability that application events normally do not provide automatically.

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Calling @Async event delivery durable.
Using events to disguise required synchronous work.
Publishing mutable domain objects to unknown listeners.

When would you use Spring application events instead of durable messaging?

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