SOA and the Integration Patterns

SOA is simply a way to think when designing systems. Service oriented integration is a way to leverage investments in existing IT systems using the principles of SOA. As I have mention before, Apache ServiceMix is an enterprise service bus (ESB) that provides a platform for system integration utilizing reusable components in a service oriented manner. Also I have stated the ServiceMix 4.0, the next generation of the ServiceMix ESB.
Among the issues of the SOA case is actually the integration of infrastructure ‘places’, new and more important existing ones. Bruce Snyder gave the session ‘Taking Apache Camel for a Ride’ were he looked up into the Enterprise Integration Patterns.

“The revered Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) book is indispensable for handling messaging-based integration, but utilizing these patterns in your own code can be tedious, especially if you have to write the code from scratch every time. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a simple API for these patterns that makes this easier? Enter Apache Camel, a message routing and mediation engine that provides a POJO-based implementation of the EIP patterns and a wonderfully simple Domain Specific Language (DSL) for expressing message routes.”

From this point of view, a question – revelation came up:

Camel is a Java API that allows you to do message routing very easily. It implements many of the patterns found in Enterprise Integration Patterns. It doesn't require a container and can be run in any Java-based environment. Camel has a whole bunch of components (Bruce is showing a 6 x 10 grid with a component name in each grid. In other words, there's 60 components that Camel can use. Examples include: ActiveMQ, SQL, Velocity, File and iBATIS).

The revelation…

Chris Richardson asks "What's left inside of ServiceMix". Why use ServiceMix if you have Camel? ServiceMix is a container that can run standalone or inside an app server. You can run distributed ServiceMix as a federated USB. Camel is much smaller and lightweight and is really just a Java API. ServiceMix 4 changed from a JBI-based architecture to OSGi (based on Apache Felix). They also expect to create your routes for ServiceMix 4 with Camel instead of XML. To process messages, you can use many different languages: BeanShell, JavaScript, Groovy, Python, PHP, Ruby, JSP EL, OGNL, SQL, XPath and XQuery.

Camel has a CamelContext that's similar to Spring's ApplicationContext. You can initialize it in Java and add your routes to it:

CamelContext context = new DefaultCamelContext();

context.addRoutes(new MyRouterBuilder());

context.start();

Or you can initialize it using XML:

    com.acme.routes

Camel's RouteBuilder contains a fluid API that allows you to define to/from and other criteria. At this point, Bruce is showing a number of examples using the Java API. He's showing a Content Based Router, a Message Filter, a Splitter, an Aggregator, a Message Translator, a Resequencer, a Throttler and a Delayer.

Bruce spent the last 10 minutes doing a demo using Eclipse, m2eclipse, the camel-maven-plugin and ActiveMQ. It's funny to see a command-line guy like Bruce say he can't live w/o m2eclipse. I guess Maven's XML isn't so great after all.

Camel is built on top of Spring and has good integration. Apparently, the Camel developers tried to get it added to Spring, but the SpringSource guys didn't want it. Coincidentally, Spring Integration was released about a year later.

Camel also allows you to use "beans" and bind them to Camel Endpoints with annotations. For example:

public class Foo {

    @MessageDriven (uri="activemq:cheese")

    public void onCheese(String name) {

        ...

    }

}

Other annotations include @XPath, @Header and @EndpointInject.

Camel can also be used for BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). Rather than using RouteBuilder, you can use ActivityBuilder to listen for activities and create event notifications.

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