Apache Camel is an open source integration platform.
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Cleo Clarify
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Cleo Clarify, formerly Extol Business Integrator, is a business-to-business middleware offering owned and supported by Cleo since its 2016 acquisition of Extol.
Message brokering across different systems, with transactionality and the ability to have fine tuned control over what happens using Java (or other languages), instead of a heavy, proprietary languages. One situation that it doesn't fit very well (as far as I have experienced) is when your workflow requires significant data mapping. While possible when using Java tooling, some other visual data mapping tools in other integration frameworks are easier to work with.
CLEO Clarify is best suited in an environment where EDI is a main source of business to business electronic communications (EDI). It also is very well suited to take data from multiple sources and convert it from any to any format to fit your requirements. CLEO Clarify may be more well suited to companies that have capable IT team members such as an EDI specialist or technical people.
Camel has an easy learning curve. It is fairly well documented and there are about 5-6 books on Camel.
There is a large user group and blogs devoted to all things Camel and the developers of Camel provide quick answers and have also been very quick to patch Camel, when bugs are reported.
Camel integrates well with well known frameworks like Spring, and other middleware products like Apache Karaf and Servicemix.
There are over 150 components for the Camel framework that help integrate with diverse software platforms.
If you are looking for a Java-based open source low cost equivalent to webMethods or Azure Logic Apps, Apache Camel is an excellent choice as it is mature and widely deployed, and included in many vendored Java application servers too such as Redhat JBoss EAP. Apache Camel is lacking on the GUI tooling side compared to commercial products such as webMethods or Azure Logic Apps.
Cost wise the products may be similar but on the basis of ease of implementation and use, for us CLEO Clarify won that battle even though we hired an EDI specialist who had worked for years with Seeburger BIS. This was very telling for us as he we very well versed in Seeburger and could easily had recommended them, but instead did a thorough analysis and decided upon CLEO for our solution.
Very fast time to market in that so many components are available to use immediately.
Error handling mechanisms and patterns of practice are robust and easy to use which in turn has made our application more robust from the start, so fewer bugs.
However, testing and debugging routes is more challenging than working is standard Java so that takes more time (less time than writing the components from scratch).
Most people don't know Camel coming in and many junior developers find it overwhelming and are not enthusiastic to learn it. So finding people that want to develop/maintain it is a challenge.
CLEO Clarify has helped us take our compliance rating with our biggest customers from around 25% with our ERP integrated solution, up to 98% just by switching to CLEO and being able to onboard new customers effectively within one week where it used to take 30 to 45 days and have multiple errors.
We are able to continue to find applications that CLEO is perfectly suited for including eComm and BI data collection.
