Camellos III - Zipping Files with Apache Camel Example

I played a bit more with Apache Camel and I extended my little Camellos project (See this blogpost for details, including for directions to get to the source code) by another simple Example:

1. poll directory zip-input for any type of files
   
2. pack the files using the Zip data format
   
3. output files to the zip-output directory

I thought this would be an easy example to get my feet a bit more wet with Camel. Apache Camel provides 2 data formats for zipping files:

• GZip Data Format (Source Code)
• Zip Data Format (Source Code)

Interestingly, using the marshaller for the Zip data format, you're unable to generate standard zip file. Looking through the source code of the Zip daa format, it turns out that Apache Camel is using a DeflaterOutputStream to created the compressed data versus using a ZipOutputStream. A bug??

Thus, what a great opportunity to create my fist customized Camel Data Format implementation :-) I basically just took the existing ZipDataFormat class and converted it to using a ZipOutputstream, and by adding a single ZipEntry for my file. This works quite well.

I also added a reverse route for unzipping a file. One limitation exists. The zipfile can contain only one file. I am not sure, yet, how to solve the issue when you have more than one file in your zip file...I guess this may be a task for the Splitter or Aggregator components.