Blog from February, 2010

It is a sign of growth and popularity in any project if a book is being published about the project.

It is fair to establish that Apache Camel and its community have grown well over the last few years.
It was just a year ago when Apache Camel became a Top Level Project at Apache, moving out from under Apache ActiveMQ.

Now a year later we are happy to announce a dedicated book about Apache Camel is in the works entitled Camel in Action.

The book is being published by Manning, which is known for its high standard of technical books.
The authors are from within the core team of Camel which means the information is accurate and from the source.
It's up to date and distills details and insights that only people deeply involved with Camel could provide.

The authors are:

• Claus Ibsen, Committer and lead
• Jonathan Anstey, Committer
• Hadrian Zbarcea, Committer, Chair of PMC and Release Manager

This book is essentially the Camel bible. It contains 14 chapters which are highly practical,
with examples demonstrating how you can get your head around Camel and be successful.
At present time 8 chapters are available through the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP).
The first 6 chapters have already been copy edited, which ensures a high standard for early access materials.

The topic for Chapter 14 is still open and is currently being debated in the book's online forum.
The forum is the meeting point between the authors and the readers.

Chapter 1 is a free chapter which is recommended for anyone starting with Camel. It explains what Camel is and what it is NOT.
It takes you through how to download, install and get started with your first example. And most importantly it also explains
the basic and core Camel concepts which ensure you are well prepared to understand the lingo used in Apache Camel and in integration in general.

If you are interested in buying the book, Manning have provided us with an exclusive and limited discount of 30%.
You can use coupon code camel30 when ordering online from the Manning bookstore.

We have also gathered a page which lists other books that are related to Camel.

Links:

• Camel in Action book
• Author Online Forum

After a bit over two months of hard work we are pleased to introduce the Apache Camel 2.2.0 Release.

This is another major effort featuring 181 issues resolved. The Camel community is growing at a faster pace and we see a lot of involvement and contributions.

The feature and improvements list is too large to fit here, so please check out the release notes.

Most notable changes are:

• Graceful Shutdown which ensures a more reliable shutdown of Camel
• File component now delete orphaned lock files on startup to remedy situions where Camel was abruptly killed
• Improved error message on startup in case where Camel routes are misconfigured
• Improved logging of exceptions being thrown, which now is logged by default at ERROR level
• Fixed issue with using Camel annotations on beans proxied with CGLIB such as when using Hibernate or Spring AOP
• Improvements to Aggregator, Routing Slip, Recipient List and Multicast
• Reduced the optional dependencies on Spring jars
• Added new log in the DSL for logging dynamic human readable messages (think like doing System.out.println)
• Introduced NotifyBuilder which helps during testing. For example when testing routes without mocks etc. It will help to notify when a certain condition has occurred such as X messages is done etc.

And a bunch of new components contributed by the community such as

• camel-jboss for running Camel inside JBoss Application Server which uses it specialized classloading which prevents typically frameworks to not work out of the box inside JBoss.
• FTP Now supports FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS)
• SMPP To send and receive SMS using Short Messaging Service Center using the JSMPP library
• Lucene Uses Apache Lucene to perform Java-based indexing and full text based searches using advanced analysis/tokenization capabilities
• HDFS For reading/writing from/to an HDFS filesystem

As usual, a lot of fixes and enhancement of the 90+ Components

Many thanks and our gratitude to all the contributors who made this release possible. Download Camel now and enjoy the ride!
The Camel Riders

The Apache Camel PMC is pleased to introduce two new committers: Ashwin Karpe and Stanley Lewis. We are very happy with the sustained growth of the project and look forward to continued contributions from the community and adding to the ranks of Camel Riders.

Ashwin Karpe was involved with Camel for well over a year now. Ashwin is an active promoter of and contributor to Camel. Most notable are his recent contributions of new components like camel-printer, camel-lucene and a few others which are really nice additions to the Camel portfolio.

Stan Lewis has also a long track record with Camel. He contributed to the code and got involved with the community on the mailing lists. Stan reworked a few components and made them production ready, like atom, xmpp and more recently tackled the core and other components like freemarker and mina.

Ashwin, Stan, on behalf of the Camel PMC, welcome to Apache!