Running Camel standalone

Is it possible to start Camel as a standalone application, without embedding it in another application?

Yes Camel can run standalone or in any container. Running Standalone is as simple just to create a CamelContext, add routes and start it.

The starting guide is a good place to start:
getting-started

And the concrete walk through a plain old java main example
walk-through-an-example

The FAQ have some more details.
faq

And if you use Maven for your projects Camel has maven tools to boot up in standalone mode and quickly run you Camel application
camel-maven-plugin

This is how you can run the examples that is included in the Camel distribution.
In Camel 1.4 we will also have ANT build.xml files to quickly start the examples standalone.