I have been playing around with Apache Camel for a couple of projects recently, and so far I’m very impressed. Camel is one of a number of frameworks that seem to have sprung up over the past few years in response to the book Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. It attempts to provide mechanisms to support all the patterns described in the book. And it does so very well, from what I have experienced so far. So I thought I would mention a couple of things I have done with it.
A simple content-based router
The problem I was trying to solve was that a legacy application was designed to listen to a WebSphere MQ queue, which would contain requests for a variety of operations. A new application had been developed to handle a subset of these operations. I couldn’t have both applications listening to the same queue, so I needed to divert particular operation request messages to a separate new queue.