Three mindblowing days of filling my brain with new stuff

This week we at Redpill-Linpro had the great fortune to be instructed by Charles Moulliard (FuseSource) on advanced topics covering ServiceMix and Camel.

Talking from my own experience I already had quite a good grasp of Camel, but ServiceMix was probably the eye-opener for me. Until now I've previously rolled my eyes each time SM was mentioned, thinking "why do we need yet another application platform when we have web servers, Spring, JEE servers etc already?".
What I did not understand until now is the flexibility you gain when deploying your integrations to a pure OSGI stack such as Karaf (which is the layer on top of your OSGI runtime) instead of using classic hierarchical class-loading servers.

One thing that also was clear is that ServiceMix, although labeled as an ESB, is actually sort of an application server in the sense that it is not only used for integration applications. Sure, you have a lot of Camel/CXF/ActiveMQ bundles already prebuilt and ready to be utilized, but looking at the architecture it is plain to see that any type of OSGI applications could benefit by being deployed into Karaf.

I can safely say that I've bought the hype of OSGI now after finally understanding what it actually gives you. I just hope for some better tooling when it comes to declaring your package exports and imports as that seems to be an area where you'll need to perform a lot of trial and error to get correct.

We also had some good discussions concerning the fact that a lot of supplementary (Activiti, JAMES etc..) and even competing frameworks already bundle Camel to expose transport options that are not already implemented by the framework itself. JBoss ESB i.e. comes with a Camel Gateway which could be used to handle messages originating from all types of transports available in Camel that the native ESB does not have adapters for.
It will be very interesting to see how long it takes for the big players (IBM and Oracle, I'm looking at you) to bundle Camel as part of their connector strategy. I can easily fantasize about i.e. a future Camel node in the Websphere Message Broker product as a way to extend the possible transport that it could provide.

'til next time!