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Apache Camel is widely used as an enterprise integration solution by organizations transitioning from a monolithic to a service-oriented …
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What is Apache Camel?
Apache Camel is an open source integration platform.
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Apache Camel is widely used as an enterprise integration solution by organizations transitioning from a monolithic to a service-oriented architecture. Its lightweight nature, ease of use, and implementation of existing integration patterns make it a popular choice. Users praise Apache Camel for its groovy DSL, which simplifies the process of connecting microservices and enabling the publish-subscribe pattern by consuming from and producing to AWS SQS queues.
Quartz jobs heavily rely on Apache Camel for seamless integration, and Cox Communications utilizes this product in various departments to provide quick and scalable integration of diverse business systems. By reducing development effort and resources, Apache Camel fits well within Cox's existing infrastructure and is often used alongside customized versions of Camel components. In product development teams, Apache Camel is essential for core event processing, facilitating interactions over JMS between different modules while handling marshaling, unmarshaling, and sending/receiving POJOs.
With its plethora of plugins for various connectors and a user-friendly experience, Apache Camel serves as an alternative integration framework to heavier middleware solutions. It acts as a component of an Enterprise Service Bus, defining message routing and transformation rules for integrating on-premise applications and cloud services. Moreover, Apache Camel bridges systems with changing implementations and message formats, enabling seamless integration and workflow pipelines. Teams appreciate the time-saving and scalable nature of this product, making it a preferred choice in multiple organizations for EIP and event-based code projects. Lastly, Apache Camel proves to be vital as an integration layer between UI, backend services, and databases using its REST component and XML/Java DSL solutions.
The open-source nature of Apache Camel particularly shines when performing daily integration activities in non-production environments. It offers a reliable platform for deriving code from files based on defined logic and processes. Additionally, Apache Camel handles error handling with built-in features like error retry, waiting, and exponential backoff. This makes it the go-to choice for integrating multiple sources and sinks of data with different formats and protocols, allowing for the implementation of complex logic. Overall, Apache Camel is highly regarded for its ability to simplify integration activities and enable seamless connectivity across various systems and platforms.
Easy Learning Curve: Several users have found Apache Camel to have an easy learning curve, allowing them to quickly grasp the concepts and start using it efficiently.
Extensive Integration Support: Many reviewers have praised Apache Camel for its extensive support for integration with diverse software platforms. With over 150 components available, users can seamlessly integrate Camel with various frameworks and middleware products such as Spring, Apache Karaf, and Servicemix.
Robustness and Reliability: Numerous users have highlighted the robustness of Apache Camel in handling various information transfer protocols out-of-the-box. They appreciate that it is a reliable solution for their integration needs, making it suitable for creating microservices and handling complex business logic.
Lack of Detail in Documentation: Several users have found the documentation to be lacking in detail and feel that it could use improvement. They mention that sometimes it takes trial and error to figure out how to do something, indicating a need for more comprehensive instructions.
Steep Learning Curve: Users have mentioned that there is a relatively steep learning curve associated with using the software. Some users felt overwhelmed by the complexity and required a significant amount of time and effort to become proficient in its usage.
Dependence on Java Skills: A common concern expressed by users is the heavy dependence on Java skills for optimal use of the software. Many users feel that a great skill set in Java is required to effectively utilize all the features and capabilities offered by the software.
Users have praised Apache Camel as an excellent choice for beginners in integration software development. They have found it to be user-friendly and valuable when starting out in this field. Reviewers also recommend utilizing online videos for additional assistance with Apache Camel. Video tutorials offer helpful insights and explanations. Another common recommendation is to consider Apache Camel as a viable alternative to larger middleware options like IBM. Users appreciate its flexibility and simplicity compared to more complex and expensive alternatives. It is also advised to have a clear understanding of EIPS (Enterprise Integration Patterns) when using Apache Camel. Additionally, users suggest keeping routes small and limiting the number of threads on endpoints to prevent idle threads from consuming locks.
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My team uses Apache Camel as a Platform as a Software service in the tech stack to perform integration of their code on a component basis by deriving it from files based on a defined logic and processes and then make those available to testers and UAT group. Apache Camel being opensource is very helpful for our team to perform their daily integration activities in non prod environment for quick testing of their work.
- open source and a great set of component feature set - always latest features available for integration
- works well with spring boot
- great community and support for any kind of workflow
- based on enterprise integration patterns which helps our developers achieve integration tasks with all kinds of API services
- didn't work well when our developers tried to transform heavy data sets
- Apache Camel's whole logic is based on java so team needs to have a great skill set in java
- if there are a handful of workflows then Apache Camel's full potential can't be realized
- handle multiple workflows
- data distribution
- modernizing legacy apps and APIs
- Process web-submitted forms and generating reports
- huge cost saving and quick turn around in terms of extracting data from files and integrating them to our processes
- ease the work with java objects
- modernizing our API services
- ease of using it with Apache's TomCat server
working with Apache's TomCat server, our developer found it most easy given the UI of Camel to perform integration and data processing tasks. when compared to the other two softwares they felt the need to learn new tools outside of Apache family can be avoided and with kafka, the UI is similar but Camel just had more intuitive features to help them do their tasks for almost 3 years now.
April 13, 2017
Camel is awesome!
I've used Apache Camel as a great alternative integration framework compared to heavier middleware solutions from companies like IBM. It serves that purpose wonderfully, and is a total pleasure to use. Great plugins for almost any connector you could need, and they all work as expected.
- Open source, which is vitally important
- Great integration with Java frameworks such as Spring Boot, allowing it to be deployed however you need to deploy it
- Wonderful testing tools as part of the framework
- Documentation could use some work, sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to figure out how to do something.
- Easier development time and less infrastructure cost than similar proprietary middleware.
WebSphere Message Broker - Expensive, old, hard to use, bad connectors
Mulesoft - Very similar to Camel, but expensive and buggy
Mulesoft - Very similar to Camel, but expensive and buggy
April 03, 2017
EIP using Camel
We use it as the processing backbone/Enterprise Integration Pattern (EIP) framework for several products that we develop. It is used to provide components for message ingest, orchestration and export. By orchestration, I mean the determination and execution of the path of any single message through the application. It also is our primary error handling mechanism as it provides out-of-the-box error retry, waiting and exponential backoff.
- The Java DSP is one of the primary reasons we chose Camel over Spring Integration's XML-based route definitions. It provides compile-time checking of syntax with auto-complete in an IDE (Eclipse, etc).
- The component documentation on the website is phenomenal.
- Error handling mechanisms are robust and easy to use and set up. Default settings are great and intuitive.
- The ability to define distinct contexts within the same application and define context-wide, context-specific error handling is great as well.
- I find the "seda" endpoint to be less obvious that it is doing multi-threading than Spring Integration's executor mechanism.
- Integration with Spring Beans is pretty good, but I believe SI's is a bit better (for obvious reasons, both being Spring products).
- SI's use support is probably a bit better/faster and I believe the user base is larger so that there are most questions/answers for SI on StackOverflow
- 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.
- Spring Integration
We did a comparison of the two products with an example application that tested about 10 distinct EIP pattern. We wrote Camel in XML and Java DSL and SI in XML. This was about 3 years ago. At the time, I found the threading model in SI to be more intuitive and Camel's seda. However, Camel's documentation at the time was far and away more complete (Wiki pages for Camel vs looking through XML schema for SI). Since the SI has improved their documentation. The main factor that I believe still sets Camel apart is the Java DSL. Writing routes is complicated enough, but doing so in XML would be just painful.
I worked on a product development team creating an enterprise cybersecurity product. The core event processing mechanism of the product used Apache Camel in many places, mainly to handle interactions over JMS between the various modules of the product. Apache Camel especially makes the process of sending a POJO from one method to another across two separate application components, handling the marshaling and unmarshaling via JAXB, and the sending and receiving via JMS. It achieves all this routing via a simple XML configuration that is part of the application's spring context (although it can also be configured procedurally).
- Configuration of information routing via XML in a Sprint Context.
- Robustness. Apache Camel is capable of handling many different information transfer protocols out-of-the-box.
- Extensibility. Apache Camel also allows for custom routing handlers where needed.
- Some of the documentation is a little sparse. In particular, its TCP-based routes use an underlying Netty server, and the interactions between Netty's decoder capabilities and Apache Camel's routing/handler capabilities can be a little muddy at times. In general it is clear which routes and endpoints are the more frequently used and which haven't been given as much attention.
- There was certainly a positive impact in terms of code maintainability and ease of implementing new messaging pipelines, however, it's a little difficult to quantify.
Esper is only similar in that they both are involved in complex even processing, however Esper's aim is a little more complex and specialized. In general however I found Apache Camel to be much easier to understand, implement and debug, whereas Esper's DSL can get very complicated and hard to debug and test. When done correctly however, Esper offers much more analytical capabilities for correlating and reasoning about asynchronous events.