News

New Java Integration Framework Launches

• By John K. Waters
• April 13, 2011

Open source integration and messaging company FuseSource this week unveiled a new Eclipse-based IDE for the Apache Camel integration framework.

Fuse IDE for Camel comes with a GUI that allows for drag-and-drop integration components and is preloaded with enterprise integration patterns on which the framework is based.

Apache Camel is the open-source, Java-based integration framework based on the patterns identified in Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003), written by Google software engineer Gregor Hohpe and IBM IT specialist Bobby Woolf. The two authors essentially cataloged a set of accepted solutions to recurring problems and documented "the kind of experience that usually lives only in architects' heads."

The Camel framework allows users to create integration routes between software components using the Camel domain-specific language (DSL)-- in other words, to transmit data or messages among different applications or to different parts of a single app.

The new Fuse IDE is an Eclipse plug-in that adds a graphical component to this process that lets developers connect components visually by dragging patterns to a palette, where they can be tied together into a route without using the DSL.

The tooling is integrated with Eclipse to provide a standard development environment. And it's designed to allow developers to import existing routes defined in XML.

The new IDE comes with all the integration patterns described in Hohpe and Woolf's book, the company says. All of the tool's integration components use standard notation for defining and reusing routes. It employs the open source Java testing framework JUnit to generate tests for the Camel routes. The IDE can deploy integration routes into in JVMs, Java EE servers, Apache ServiceMix and Spring, among other technologies.

Bedford, Mass-based FuseSource, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of infrastructure software maker Progress Software, is focused on developing products based on several open source Apache projects, including in addition to the Camel project, Apache ServiceMix, Apache ActiveMQ and Apache CXF.

The new IDE is available as part of a subscription package for the company's Fuse Mediation Router, a rule-based routing and transport mediation engine. The company describes the Router product as a mediation engine "that combines the ease of basic POJO [plain old Java object] development with the clarity of the standard Enterprise Integration Patterns."

However, a trial version of the new IDE for Camel is also available for immediate download here.

The company will be showing the product at the first CamelOne Conference, scheduled for May 24 through 26 in Arlington, Va.