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Tutorial - camel-example-reportincident

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Introduction

Creating this tutorial was inspired by a real life use-case I discussed over the phone with a collegecolleague. He was working at a client that whom uses a heavy-weight integration platform from a very large vendor. He was in talks with contractors developer shops to implement a new integration on this heavy piece of platform - his trouble was though that the price was tripled when the contractors heard it had to be on this platformplatform. His trouble was the shop tripled the price when they realized the platform of choice. So I was wondering how we could do this integration on with Camel. Can it be done in one day, without tripling the cost .

This tutorial is written during the development of the integration. I have decided to start off with a sample that isn't Camel's but standard Java and then plugin Camel as we goes. Just as when people needed to learn Spring you could consume it piece by piece, the same goes with Camel.

The target reader is person whom hasn't experience or just started using Camel.

Motivation for this tutorial

I wrote this tutorial motivated as Camel lacked an example application that was based on the web application deployment model. The entire world hasn't moved to pure OSGi deployments yet.

The use-case

The goal is to allow staff to report incidents into a central administration. For that they use client software where they report the incident and submit it to the central administration. As this is an integration in a transition phase the administration should get these incidents by email whereas they are manually added to the database. The client software should gather the incident and submit the information to the integration platform that in term will transform the report into an email and send it to the central administrator for manual processing.

The figure below illustrates this process. The end users reports the incidents using the client applications. The incident is sent to the central integration platform as webservice. The integration platform will process the incident and send an OK acknowledgment back to the client. Then the integration will transform the message to an email and send it to the administration mail server. The users in the administration will receive the emails and take it from there.

Image AddedTODO: Figure with:
Client -> Integration Platform -> Central Administration

In EIP patterns

TODO: Figure with We distill the use case as EIP patterns

Initial Project Setup

We want the integration to be a standard .war application that can be deployed in any web container such as Tomcat, Jetty or even heavy weight application servers such as WebLogic or WebSphere. There fore we start off with the standard Maven webapp project that is created with the following long archetype command:

mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=org.apache.camel -DartifactId=camel-example-reportincident -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp

Notice that the groupId etc. doens't have to be org.apache.camel it can be com.mycompany.whatever. But I have used these package names as the example is an official part of the Camel distribution.

Then we have the basic maven folder layout. We start out with the webservice part where we want to use Apache CXF for the webservice stuff. So we add this to the pom.xml
TODO: pom with CXF

Developing the WebService

As we want to develop webservice with the contract first approach we create our .wsdl file
TODO: wsdl file

CXF wsdl2java

Then we integration the CXF wsdl2java generator in the pom.xml so we have CXF generate the needed POJO classes for our webservice contract.
TODO: CXF wsdj2java

Configuration of the web.xml

TODO: how to configure the web.xml, spring context listener, cxf files etc.

Running our webservice

TODO: Adding Jetty to pom
TODO: Generation the code
TODO: Adding the System.out and dummy response
TODO: Starting Jetty and using SoapUI to hit the webservice
TODO: Starting Jetty in debug mode so we can debug online

Adding a unit test

TODO: CXF unit test

End of part 1

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Image Added

Parts

This tutorial is divided into sections and parts:

Section A: Existing Solution, how to slowly use Camel

Part 1 - This first part explain how to setup the project and get a webservice exposed using Apache CXF. In fact we don't touch Camel yet.

Part 2 - Now we are ready to introduce Camel piece by piece (without using Spring or any XML configuration file) and create the full feature integration. This part will introduce different Camel's concepts and How we can build our solution using them like :

• CamelContext
• Endpoint, Exchange & Producer
• Components : Log, File

Part 3 - Continued from part 2 where we implement that last part of the solution with the event driven consumer and how to send the email through the Mail component.

Section B: The Camel Solution

Part 4 - We now turn into the path of Camel where it excels - the routing.
Part 5 - Is about how embed Camel with Spring and using CXF endpoints directly in Camel
Part 6 - Showing a alternative solution primarily using XML instead of Java code

Links

• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

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