1 Meeting Camel

Building complex systems from scratch is a costly endeavor, and one that’s almost never successful. An effective and less risky alternative is to assemble a system like a jigsaw puzzle from existing, proven components. We depend daily on a multitude of such integrated systems, making possible everything from phone communications, financial transactions, and health care to travel planning and entertainment.

You can’t finalize a jigsaw puzzle until you have a complete set of pieces that plug into each other simply, seamlessly, and robustly. That holds true for system integration projects as well. But whereas jigsaw puzzle pieces are made to plug into each other, the systems we integrate rarely are. Integration frameworks aim to fill this gap. As a developer, you’re less concerned about how the system you integrate works and more focused on how to interoperate with it from the outside. A good integration framework provides simple, manageable abstractions for the complex systems you’re integrating and the “glue” for plugging them together seamlessly.

1.1 Introducing Camel

1.1.1 What is Camel?

1.1.2 Why use Camel?

1.2 Getting started

1.2.1 Getting Camel

1.2.2 Your first Camel ride

1.3 Camel’s message model

1.3.1 Message

1.3.2 Exchange

1.4 Camel’s architecture

1.4.1 Architecture from 10,000 feet

1.4.2 Camel concepts

1.5 Your first Camel ride, revisited

1.6 Summary