Camellos - Discovering Apache Camel I

Over the next couple of weeks or months (depending how much spare-time I am able to allocate), I will dive into the world of Apache Camel (Also take a look at my second blog post)


Apache Camel is somewhat like a Swiss-army knife. As an integration framework (Message Routing API, Mediation Router), it implements all the Enterprise Integration Patterns from the book with the same name.


Next, Apache Camel provides a quite extensive component library supporting an impressive amount of communication protocols. Also, it support an wide range of data formats as well as integration points in terms of other frameworks such as Spring, Guice, ServiceMix, ActiveMQ et cetera.

Well, that's all nice and dandy—However, what does this mean for me as a software developer?

When you develop typical Java enterprise applications, you will sooner or later come across the requirement to connect to other systems or to add other asynchronous services to your applications. Something like:

"Hey, we need to pick up this file that comes in every night, parse it, process it and then stuff its data into our database and, while we're at it, also make sure the original file is archived somewhere in the file system."

Or maybe you just have some requirements where your application needs to send data to another server but you have to make sure, that the flow of data is "throttled" in order not to overburden your destination server during peak-processing times.

In all those cases Apache Camel can greatly simplify the implementation effort. It is basically a mini ESB in the form of a simple Java API. But it is extremely modular so you can just bits and pieces from it. In my next blog post I will show you an example showing you how it is really dead simple to get started with Apache Camel.

See second Camel related blog post.