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Apache Camel

Score6.3 out of 10

34 Reviews and Ratings

What is Apache Camel?

Apache Camel is an open source integration platform.

Categories & Use Cases

Apache Camel is a mature low cost open source alternative to commercial messaging layer products

Pros

  • Rules for routing messages between senders and receivers
  • Applying transformations to messages
  • Low cost low effort solution

Cons

  • Open source solution relies on community for support
  • Lacks graphical user interface for message routing and transformation definitions
  • Relatively steep learning curve

Most Important Features

  • Message routing
  • Message transformation
  • Maturity

Return on Investment

  • Enabled business to integrate disparate systems at relatively low cost
  • Required a relatively steep learning curve for resources to learn
  • Few expert resources are available on the market leading to senior resources being expensive

Alternatives Considered

webMethods Trading Network, webMethods.io Integration (webMethods Integration Cloud), Azure Service Bus and Azure Logic Apps

Other Software Used

webMethods Trading Network, webMethods.io Integration (webMethods Integration Cloud), Azure Service Bus, Azure Logic Apps

Routing made simple!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Apache Camel as a bridge between various systems, where implementation and message format is changing fairly often. Integration and tasks workflow pipeline. This system allows for fast and scale able integrations and deployment. This has saved us man time and power.

Pros

  • Adding new routes is very easy and efficient
  • Easy to use, easy to get up and running
  • Great integration with java frameworks

Cons

  • The documentation is a little deficient
  • Lacking a framework integration with big data capabilities

Most Important Features

  • Ease of use
  • Lightweight
  • XML and Java based configuration is supported.
  • The routing engine is superb

Return on Investment

  • Very lightweight and basic tool
  • Does not allow for greater customization

Alternatives Considered

IBM App Connect

Other Software Used

IBM App Connect, Device42, Wrike

Apache Camel - Integrate lots of things together with custom complex business logic on top

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We had some workloads where we need to integrate multiple sources & sinks of data, with different formats & protocols, while doing some pretty complex logic on top of that. Apache Camel was a natural choice for it since there are tons of built-in components that allow making easy connections to all the sources & sinks that we need. On the other hand, the Java-native nature of Apache Camel means writing & testing whatever logic we need is just business-as-usual for the engineers.

Pros

  • Easy & reliable integration with lots of types of source or sink of data.
  • Complex business logic could be written in Java.
  • Excellent unit testing support with Java.

Cons

  • Documentation could be improved
  • Support for complex & advance integration options could be better
  • Navigating the Java code base requires learning curve

Most Important Features

  • Built-in components
  • Java-native nature
  • Configuration-as-code

Return on Investment

  • We got all diverse sources & sinks integrated.
  • We got our complex business logic implemented.
  • All things checked in to SCM & unit-tested.

Other Software Used

IntelliJ IDEA, Bitbucket, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Very Good and Lightweight Integration Solution for your Applications

Pros

  • open source and a great set of component feature set - always latest features available for integration
  • works well with spring boot
  • great community and support for any kind of workflow
  • based on enterprise integration patterns which helps our developers achieve integration tasks with all kinds of API services

Cons

  • didn't work well when our developers tried to transform heavy data sets
  • Apache Camel's whole logic is based on java so team needs to have a great skill set in java
  • if there are a handful of workflows then Apache Camel's full potential can't be realized

Most Important Features

  • handle multiple workflows
  • data distribution
  • modernizing legacy apps and APIs
  • Process web-submitted forms and generating reports

Return on Investment

  • huge cost saving and quick turn around in terms of extracting data from files and integrating them to our processes
  • ease the work with java objects
  • modernizing our API services
  • ease of using it with Apache's TomCat server

Alternatives Considered

Pivotal RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka

Other Software Used

Apache Kafka, Pivotal RabbitMQ

best lightweight integration solution

Pros

  • Producing to and consuming from any messaging system
  • Message type conversion
  • Large support library

Cons

  • Documentation could use some more detail
  • Hot deployment

Return on Investment

  • When we were looking to move to a service oriented architecture, Apache Camel got us started quickly. It continues to be the backbone of our integration.

Other Software Used

Springs.io, Amazon CloudSearch, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)