Apache Camel Introduction

Building complex systems from scratch is a very costly endeavor, and one that’s almost never successful. An effective and less risky alternative is to assemble a system like a jigsaw puzzle from existing, proven components. We depend daily on a multitude of such integrated systems, making possible everything from phone communications, financial transactions, and healthcare to travel planning and entertainment. You can’t finalize a jigsaw puzzle until you have a complete set of pieces that plug into each other simply, seamlessly, and robustly. That holds true for system integration projects as well. But whereas jigsaw puzzle pieces are made to plug into each other, the systems we integrate rarely are. Integration frameworks aim to fill this gap.

As an integrator, you’re less concerned about how the system you integrate works and more focused on how to interoperate with it from the outside. A good integration framework provides simple, manageable abstractions for the complex systems you’re integrating and the “glue” for plugging them together seamlessly. Apache Camel is such an integration framework.

At the core of the Camel framework is a routing engine, or more precisely a routing engine builder. It allows you to define your own routing rules, decide from which sources to accept messages, and determine how to process and send those messages to other destinations. Camel uses an integration language that allows you to define complex routing rules, akin to business processes. One of the fundamental principles of Camel is that it makes no assumptions about the type of data you need to process. This is an important point, because it gives you, the developer, an opportunity to integrate any kind of system, without the need to convert your data to a canonical format. Camel offers higher-level abstractions that allow you to interact with various systems using the same API regardless of the protocol or data type the systems are using. Components in Camel provide specific implementations of the API that target different protocols and data types. Out of the box, Camel comes with support for over 80 protocols and data types. Its extensible and modular architecture allows you to implement and seamlessly plug in support for your own protocols, proprietary or not.

These architectural choices eliminate the need for unnecessary conversions and make Camel not only faster but also very lean.

	You can access the documentation for every component by clicking on the Properties -> Documentation tab.
	You can find all the texts used in the labs in a text file in the support folder.