B The Camel community

As with any open source project, the community behind it is extremely important. We think of community as an all-encompassing term for the official website, mailing lists, the issue tracker, Camel users, projects based on or extending Camel, and much more. It’s hard to measure how vibrant a community is when it has this many moving parts, but it’s important. Having a stagnant or small community will make your (the user’s) experience more difficult when things go wrong and during development in general. We think Camel’s community is highly active and expanding, so you are in luck!

In this appendix we cover some main aspects of the Camel community.

B.1   Apache Camel website

The Apache Camel website, http://camel.apache.org, will be your main resource when using Camel. You may have already noticed that we reference pages from the Camel website throughout the book. That’s no mistake—it’s a good resource for us too.

On the Camel website, you’ll find links for downloads, documentation, support, and many other topics.

B.2   JIRA, mailing lists, and IRC

When things don’t go as planned, you’ll need to get help from people in the Camel community. If you know you have a problem with a demonstrative test case or have a feature request, you can create a ticket in Camel’s JIRA instance: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CAMEL. From here, one of the Camel developers will assign the ticket to themselves and possibly commit a fix for the issue. If you want to fix the issue yourself, please use GitHub at per the next section. More information on contributing is also available in the Camel website at http://camel.apache.org/contributing.html.

When you have general questions, you can send a message to the Camel user list (http://camel.apache.org/mailing-lists.html), which will be answered by one of the Camel developers or another Camel user.

You can even chat in real time with a Camel developer or user on the Camel IRC chat room (http://camel.apache.org/irc-room.html).

B.3   Camel at GitHub

GitHub has really revolutionized open source collaboration. It's hard these days to find an active open source project that hasn't moved over to GitHub in fact! Camel at GitHub (https://github.com/apache/camel) is actually just a mirror of the official Git repo at https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/camel.git but users and contributors are recommended to use the GitHub copy. The reason is mainly for simple collaboration. For folks wishing to submit a potential bug fix, fix for docs, or contribute a new example, GitHub pull requests (PRs) are an easy way for Camel maintainers to review, provide feedback and merge your code. PRs are the preferred method of code contribution actually.

While you check out Camel at GitHub its also nice to star the project to make the maintainers feel appreciated ;-)

B.4   Camel at Stack Overflow

These days Stack Overflow is the top question and answer website for all things related to programming. Many people use Stack Overflow instead of posting questions to the official Apache Camel mailing list. This is fine of course and can be considered part of the wider Camel community. Committers frequently search out and help folks posting questions on Stack Overflow. Be sure when asking or answering a Camel-related topic to use the tag “apache-camel” so it is noticed. At the time of writing there were over 6000 topics discussed:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/apache-camel

B.5   Commercial Camel Offerings

There are plenty of companies that specialize in Camel and offer paid support as well as consulting. The full list is at: http://camel.apache.org/commercial-camel-offerings.html

One company on that list is Red Hat, where both authors are employed. Apache Camel support at Red Hat comes from the JBoss Fuse product line, which is an open source integration platform. Red Hat does the same for other popular Apache projects as well, including Karaf, ActiveMQ, Artemis, ServiceMix, Tomcat, Qpid, and CXF. The JBoss Fuse team includes founders, PMC members, and many of the committers to Apache Camel, and they know the code better than anyone else does[1]. The JBoss Fuse website[2] includes free downloads, documentation, training videos, webinars, and other tools to help developers get started and be successful with Apache Camel.

B.6   Camel Tooling

Since the first edition of this book, tooling for Camel has expanded such that now we had to devote an entire chapter to this topic. None of the GUI tooling is developed at the Apache Camel project so it can be considered part of the wider community. Check out tooling projects like hawtio, JBoss Camel Developer Toolsl, and the Camel plugin for IntelliJ IDEA in chapter 19.

B.7   Camel-extra project

Camel ships with a large number of components, but there are also other components available separately from the camel-extra project at GitHub (https://camel-extra.github.io). The main motivator for not including all Camel components in the main distribution is licensing. Apache Camel is developed and distributed under the Apache License, version 2. The camel-extra project contains components that integrate with libraries that have GPL and LGPL licenses, which are incompatible with Apache.

At camel-extra, you’ll find components for integrating with the following, among others:

The components from camel-extra are not officially affiliated with or supported by Apache. In addition, it doesn't always follow Camel's release cycle so is more likely to be outdated.

B.8   Camel quick reference card

There’s a printable quick reference card available for several of Camel’s EIPs at dzone.com (http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/enterprise-integration). This card contains a short description of each EIP, followed by Java DSL and Spring XML snippets that you can reuse in your own applications.

B.9   Becoming a Camel committer

Yes, it is possible to become an Apache Camel committer yourself. To do this you must contribute in the community. So contributions could be a combination of answering questions on the mailing list or Stack Overflow, contributing new features or bug fixes via PRs, writing blogs or articles about Camel, etc. The key thing is to keep up with contributions over a period of time. There isn't a set period of time or amount of code you need to submit, it really varies. But after a while, someone from the Camel Project Management Committee (PMC) will invite you to become a committer on the Camel project. Which means that after you accept, you will be able to commit code directly to Camel yourself and not have to fuss with submitting PRs for everything.

B.10   Other resources

The Camel website has an extensive collection of links to external articles, blogs, books (http://camel.apache.org/books.html – there are seven out now!), projects, presentations, videos, podcasts, and other sources that cover Camel (http://camel.apache.org/articles.html). There’s also a link collection to other third-party Camel projects and companies who use Camel (http://camel.apache.org/user-stories.html). If you’ve written a blog entry or article, or your company uses Camel and wants to have a link added, please contact the Camel team on the mailing list.