Hello to both CAMEL and JOnAS enthusiasts

Recently, both Apache CAMEL 2.5.0 and OW2 JOnAS 5.2.0-M3 have been released. We are therefore pleased to announce the immediate availability of the JOnAS + CAMEL packaging, version 1.5.5.

The main question is of course: what is this good for, anyways?

Well, OW2 JOnAS is a Java EE certified server, with all features you would expect from a Java EE server: centralized configuration, standardized monitoring, robust deployment, security, clustering, … and what's "really special" about JOnAS is that it is fully based on OSGi (Apache Felix as OSGi gateway, Apache iPOJO as the dynamic service component runtime).

Apache CAMEL is a powerful integration framework based on the Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP). It supports most of the patterns (various message receivers and pollers, routing, splitting, multiplexing, asynchronism, etc.), with support for nearly 100 components (i.e., protocols; varying from File to Web Services, Google App Engine to LDAP) and a powerful extension mechanisms.

The glue between those two is, as you would have guessed, OSGi: thanks to OSGi, Camel can be truly integrated into JOnAS. Moreover, Apache Felix iPOJO adds dynamism to this integration; you can for example use injected OSGi services in your Camel routes.

Why is Camel a big added value for existing Java EE platforms? The answer is easy: if you stick to the "standard" A2A models in your Java EE applications, you will need to implement bindings between all external applications and your applications manually. That "manual glue" will be hard to design (since you don't have such a powerful tool like EIPs available to you), hard to test and most importantly hard to maintain. Thanks to Camel interconnection between applications becomes much, much easier, centralized, standardized and robust.

And, why is JOnAS a big added value for Camel? Being a Java EE server, JOnAS supports advanced Java EE options (XA datasources, transactions support, ...) and centralized configuration, management and deployment. Thanks to JOnAS, you can therefore cluster your Apache Camel routes, easily deploy them, have monitoring features as well as advanced options such as HTTP thread pool optimizations.

If you're interested, you can read more on the JOnAS/Camel Homepage.

Both Apache Camel and OW2 JOnAS are LGPL/Apache licensed projects, therefore "free" as both in "free speech" and "free beer".

Please send over any questions to the jonas@ow2.org mailing list.