In my first two months at Talend I was mainly involved in building the first release of Talend Integration Factory (TIF). It is an Apache Licensed distribution of Camel with three interesting additions: A pre packaged OSGi container, an integration component for Talend Open Studio and some advanced examples. Let´s take a closer look at these addtions.
So why should you use Talend Integration Factory instead of Camel?
- Synchronized Release Cycles: As the version number already suggests we are following the Apache Camel releases. So for each Camel release there will be a Integration Factory release shortly after. So unlike with other products you do not have to wait half a year for the new features to appear
- No vendor lock in: The distribution is Apache Licensed so you can use it in almost any environment. We try to stay as near to the original Camel as possible. Bugfixes and Enhancements are directly committed back to Apache Camel and all other involved Open Source projects. In fact the current distribution did not need to patch Camel 2.6.0 as we got all our enhancements into the Camel Release.
- Pre packaged OSGi container based on Karaf, Camel and CXF: OSGi is very interesting for central integration servers as integrations can be deployed without restarting the server. The integration artifacts are also much smaller then for typical .war deployments. To give a rough number a .war with Camel and CXf easily reaches a size of 20MB. A typical integration project in the OSGi container is only about 100KB in size. So while the benefits are clear many fear the complexity of setting up an OSGi environment so that Camel and CXF work as expected. As TIF Container prepackages all these things it is really easy to use. Still we were very careful to keep the container open. So you can easily upgrade all dependencies even without waiting for a new TIF release. The container also leverages all the features of Apache Karaf. So deployments are very easy and nicely integrated with your maven builds
- Talend Open Studio integration: This component allows Talend Open Studio integrastions to participate in Camel routes. The component is the first step to a seamless integration with other Talend products
- Advanced Examples: We have put together some examples that show use cases that are quite common in enterprise environments. More abbout these below
The examples show
- jaxws_jms : Calling and publishing CXF JAXWS endpoints using Camel routes and JMS
- jaxrs_jms_http : Calling and publishing JAXRS endpoints using JMS and HTTP over Camel routes
- spring_security: Securing your integrations with Spring Security. Shows how to use Basic Authentication and @RolesAllowed annotations on the method level to secure CXF and Bean endpoints
- claimcheck: This example shows some advanced DSL usages. The following EAI patterns are shown: Splitter, Claimcheck, Resequencer, Delayer
All examples are built with Maven. They and work standalone, in web containers and in OSGi. Each example is self contained so it can be easily copied and used as a temlate for your own projects.