Great mail BTW; sorry for the delay responding, am just back from vacation
On 5/30/07, Jerome Banks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There seem to be a lot emerging open-source ESB/Message routing frameworks developing these days.
:)
This is a somewhat open-ended question, but what are the relative strengths and weaknesses of Camel, Synapse, and ServiceMix. They all seem to be Apache ESB-like projects with some overlap, but they must complement each other in some way.
Great question :)
Which use-cases are best handled by which projects? In particular, which use-cases are best handled by Camel?
So Synapse is a mediation engine for Axis2; so if you're using Axis2 and want to mediate, Synapse is worth a look. ServiceMix is a JBI based ESB which provides a JBI container and component suite. The big win of JBI is that its a standard that many vendors support which allows integration components to interoperate across ESBs Camel is a routing and mediation engine which can be deployed inside ServiceMix as a JBI component, used with ActiveMQ, CXF or MINA or used stand alone. Camel focusses on implementing the Enterprise Integration Patterns using a neat Java language to minimse the amount of XML required to configure routing and mediation rules. So you can view Camel as a reusable framework which can be used in your web services stack, your ESB or message broker etc.
Also, this might be flame-bait, but is Camel a pun on "Mule"?
LOL. Well, a Camel can carry 4 times as much load as other beasts of burden :) http://activemq.apache.org/camel/why-the-name-camel.html
How does Camel compare the the Mule ESB project?
I guess from 30,000 feet they're kinda similar beasts; they're both kinds of routing/mediation engines. The main differences are as follows (warning, I'm kinda biased :) * Camel uses a Java DSL in addition to Spring XML for configuring the routing rules and providing EIP implementations http://activemq.apache.org/camel/enterprise-integration-patterns.html * Camel's API is smaller & cleaner (IMHO) and is closely aligned with the APIs of JBI, CXF Bus API and JMS; based around message exchanges (with in and optional out messages) which more closely maps to REST, WS, WSDL & JBI than the UMO model Mule is based on * Camel allows the underlying transport details to be easily exposed (e.g. the JmsExchange, JbiExchange, HttpExchange objects expose all the underlying transport information & behaviour if its required) http://activemq.apache.org/camel/how-does-the-camel-api-compare-to.html * Camel supports implicit type coercion from the core API to make it simpler to connect components together requiring different types of payload & headers http://activemq.apache.org/camel/type-converter.html * Camel uses the Apache 2 License rather than Mule's restrictive commercial license I hope that helps clear things up a bit; I admit all this SOA/ESB stuff can be a bit confusing -- James ------- http://macstrac.blogspot.com/
