Liquid Reality - Christian Schneider´s Blog

Yesterday evening I did a talk about Apache Karaf and OSGi best practice together with Achim Nierbeck. Achim did the first part about OSGi basics and Apache Karaf and I did the second part about OSGi best practices.

One slide from the presentation about Karaf shows the big number of features that can be installed easily. …

Nach dem Talk auf der letzten W-JAX hatte ich nun die Gelegenheit, auch auf der JAX über Apache Camel zu sprechen. Diesmal hatte ich einen grösseren Raum zur Verfügung, der mit fast 200 Zuhörern auch gut gefüllt war. Dies zeigt das grosse Interesse an Apache Camel. Die Präsentation ist direkt im Anhang verfügbar. Diesmal ging ich stärker auf OSGi und Apache Karaf als Ablaufumgebung ein. Ich hatte auch nur 20 Folien und verwendete einen größeren Teil der Zeit für Live Demos. …

Today the 2.2.6 Version of Karaf was released. It incorporates more than 80 fixed jira issues.

One important usability improvement is the features:chooseurl command. It allows to add feature files for well known products like Apache Camel or Apache CXF in a much simpler way than the features:addurl command. …

This wednesday on the 4th of April I will give a talk about the open source integration framework Apache Camel at the Java User Group in Karlsruhe. I will start with an overview of Camel and give some insight in the Camel Architecture. The main part of the Talk will be live coding showing how easy integration can be with the Camel DSL.

See the webpage of the JUG Karlsruhe for some more details: http://jug-karlsruhe.mixxt.de/networks/events/show_event.55045

Camel has many options for deployment. If I have the freedom of choice I prefer to run Camel on Karaf but the typical case at customers is that they have a certain app server and we have to fit in. In this case the platform was JBoss 5.1. Before Camel 2.8 this was quite complicated as camel tried to scan for typeconverters on the classpath and that part failed because of the JBoss class loader. I used camel 2.8.4 and so this was no issue except for a little problem I will come back to later. …

CXF 2.6.0 will bring a lot of improvements for deployment in OSGi. Till now cxf was bundled in one OSGi bundle. Either with all features or with a minimal feature set. Thanks to Dan Kulp cxf is now delivered as individual bundles. So it can be installed with only the needed features. Besides the smaller size in many use cases this also means that we have less optional dependencies which make installation difficult. Each bundle defines the imports it really needs. …

Shows how to access databases from OSGi applications running in Karaf and how to abstract from the DB product by installing DataSources as OSGi services. Some new Karaf shell commands can be used to work with the database from the command line. Finally JDBC and JPA examples show how to use such a DataSource from user code.

Shows how to run your camel routes in the OSGi server Apache Karaf. Like for CXF blueprint is used to boot up camel. The tutorial shows three examples - a simple blueprint route, a jms2rest adapter and an order processing example.

Shows how to publish and use a simple REST and SOAP service in karaf using cxf and blueprint.

The Apache integration day at W-JAX was a big success. We had sessions about CXF, Camel, Karaf, TESB and Continuous Delivery. Now finally most presentations and examples are available.

In enterprise environments a typical requirement is that an integration has to be highly available. Typically you will use at least two nodes to achieve that. Depending on the requirements you will either want all nodes to be active or only one. The problem with having more than one active node is that messages can get out of order. So if your requirement is that your messages keep in sequence then sometimes the only way to achieve that is to make sure only one node is active at any time. …

At least for some time the whole world seemed to only talk about ESB and webservices. These technologies have their place in integration but they are quite complex and starting with them means you have to invest a lot of time and or money. Recently around the release of Java EE 6 the idea of simplicity came back to the Enterprise Java world. In this mindset I will look into some ways to do really light weight messaging with Apache Camel. …

Last week I was at the SOA / BPM days in Düsseldorf and talked about Camel Architecture and showed some practical examples. Some of the highlights were:

• Getting started with Apache Camel. Download, First project, run in Eclipse
• Make your project fit for OSGi
• Deployment on Karaf and showing the new Camel commands for the Karaf shell
• How to test and debug Camel Routes? …

Bernhard Schuhmann and I will be holding a new free Camel Webinar series in german starting in about a week at Oct 12th. More information and signup at http://www.talend.com/webinar/. The webinars are based on Hadrian Zbarcea´s english webinar series and will be similar in scope. We will start with an introduction in the first part where you learn to write and deploy your first camel route. …

The W-JAX in Munich is one of the most important Java conferences in germany. Speakers include well known experts like Dr Gernot Starke, Jürgen Höller and Adam Bien. On the 10th of November there will be a special day around the Apache integration projects. I will do the session about Apache Camel ("Integration ganz einfach mit Apache Camel"). …