Back in 2009 when we started using Streams, there was nothing else like it and the alternative of implementing the capability from scratch would have been a very substantial undertaking. Since then, many commercial and open source offerings have entered the space with various levels and durations of acceptance. Depending on the requirements of the application, some of them may be an appropriate alternative. However, for my clients and use cases, Streams provides a unique combination of stability, reliability, capability, and performance. Although, I now have more potential alternatives for performing some of the overall processing pipeline, I still depend on Streams to handle much of the 'heavy lifting'.
