Question

What configuration of Spring Integration elements, if any, would support the model of:

• One message queue, representing incoming work
• Multiple consumers reading from that queue (one message only needs to go to one
  consumer)
• Each consumer only polls when it has no work to do; if it is currently processing a message, then don’t poll. If it is doing no work, poll every X seconds to see if new work has arrived.

Answer 1

Assuming you mean with JMS,

<jms:message-driven-channel-adapter/>

See attributes such as concurrent-consumers, max-concurrent-consumers, idle-consumer-limit, idle-task-execution-limit.

The consumer management is all done by the underlying core Spring DefaultMessageListenerContainer.