Hi For Camel 4.24 we are working on the question that tooling, AI and people ask all the time when writing the next step of a route: what is the body here? A String, a byte[], a stream, a Map, a GenericFile? (CAMEL-24844)
It grew out of the local model benchmark, where some of it is already part of the runs: https://camel.apache.org/blog/2026/10/camel-local-model-benchmark-round-4/ At runtime this is already in place: an error about the body says what the body is and which step made it so (CAMEL-25749), and the message history records the body type at each step (CAMEL-25750), shown by "camel cmd route-structure", the dev console and the MCP tools. Now we are adding the static side (CAMEL-24961, first asked for in CAMEL-330 back in 2008): a new @BodyTypes annotation declares the body each component, data format and language takes and gives. It goes into the catalog, so the docs, "camel catalog doc", the MCP tools and the YAML validator know it too. This comes as a series of PRs, group by group across the components. The first ones are open: #28241, #28242, #28246, #28247, #28250 and #28251. So expect many more PRs on the way to cover all of the components, and what else. -- Claus Ibsen
