Writing Components

Writing Components

Apache Camel is designed to make it very easy to drop in new components whether they be routing components, transformers, transports etc. The idea of a component is to be a factory and manager of Endpoints.

Here are the main steps to writing a component.

• write a POJO which implements the Component interface. The simplest approach is just to derive from DefaultComponent
• to support auto-discovery of your component add a file to META-INF/services/org/apache/camel/component/FOO where FOO is the URI scheme for your component and any related endpoints on the fly

Users can then either explicitly create your component, configure it and register with a CamelContext or users can use a URI which auto-creates your component.

Dependency injection and auto-discovery

When using auto-discovery the CamelContext will default to its Injector implementation to inject any required or optional dependencies on the component. This allows you to use auto-discovery of components via URIs while still getting the benefits of dependency injection.

For example your component can depend on a JDBC DataSource or JMS ConnectionFactory which can be provided in the ApplicationContext in Spring or Module in Guice.