If you don’t know Apache Camel, think of it like a huge set of connecting plumbing for the enterprise which comes with pumps, filters and all the other plumbing gear needed to make the data flow - and then add in a reference manual on how to perform common plumbing tasks. This is what them there city folks call an “enterprise integration framework” with “Enterprise Integration Patterns”. Yet another way to look at it is “a bunch of Java libraries which make connecting Java applications together across a network more interoperable and reliable”. You can learn more about Camel in this introduction and in this guide and then in the Getting Started guide. The short version is though if you are in the business of connecting up many different enterprise systems that produce, process or consume data, then Camel will probably want to be in your toolkit.
The developers of Apache Camel have just released what they dub a minor update in Camel 2.12.0, but given the enerprise surface area that Camel covers that still comes out as a lot of enhancements - Two new APIs for endpoint completion and component configuration, annotations for endpoints with auto-created HTML documentation, message history made easy, faster Groovy with cached compilations and many many more incremental improvements. Among the developers are employees of Red Hat who are doing things like cron scheduling in routes and making backoff less aggressive and smarter - both features that made it into 2.12.0. Check the Camel 2.12.0 announcement for all the details. The amount of activity indicates a healthy community around what is not the most glamorous of tasks, but is essential enterprise work.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog