Hi Hadrian,
I agree with you that configuring a route of moderate complexity is not
as easy as we would like it to be.
I've created CAMEL-1046 and attached what I have so far.
Here is my vision of the language:
https://issues.apache.org/activemq/secure/attachment/17204/test.txt
I'm still tweaking the syntax to make it more consistent and to follow
the principle of the least surprise. And a lot of features still have
not made it to the language.
I've created a folder camel-dsl but maven is an unknown animal to me so
the folder lacks proper structure and is not hooked up to the project.
Could somebody explain the page:
http://activemq.apache.org/camel/creating-a-new-spring-based-camel-route.html
What should be archetypeArtifactId; groupId; artifactId?
Vadim.
Hadrian Zbarcea wrote:
Camel has this wonderful discovery mechanism for RouteBuilders,
TypeConverters, Languages, etc. so if one uses Camel she only needs to
write her code, drop it somewhere on the classpath and... everything works.
The only main thing that's not really pluggable is the DSL. The concept
of a DSL supported for multiple languages is unique to Camel afaik and
quite a powerful one. However:
* it is hand-crafted and this led to quite a few inconsistencies between
java, xml, scala, etc.
* the dsl is not supported in a few languages yet, such as python, ruby
(expressions are supported though)
* the ProcessorType has become huge
* it's increasingly difficult/annoying to add support for a new pattern,
because this changes the API
* does not support user-defined pattern, a user is pretty much stuck
with using a processor or bean, but cannot extend the language
* does not support alternate dsl(s) in the same language, such as java.
The processors are very powerful, and one could envision using a
different language (say something like bpel), to assemble them and get
the desired behavior.
I think the biggest hurdle is I think the fact that we must support
smart completion in the ide(s) and java is not a dynamic language. I
would like to investigate the idea of patterns being *described* in a
language (such as xml, or some other grammar) and then generate the
dsl. I think it should be feasible, based on the fact that there are
not many concepts needed to describe a pattern (as a black box) and the
generated dsl could be built once (maybe packaged as a separate jar) and
reused.
Your thoughts highly appreciated.
Hadrian
