Apache Camel 1.4.0 released with 261 new features, improvements and fixes

Claus beat me to it, so being lazy I'm just gonna quote his post :)

Just after 3½ months since release 1.3.0 of Apache Camel we have been very busy and have resolved 261 tickets.

Check out the release notes and go grab it from the download page.

If you are not familiar with Apache Camel then check out the FAQ or the Getting Started guide.

If you have more time and a fresh brew of coffee then I encourage you to read a somewhat different tutorial that focus on introducing Camel into an existing project step by step. The tutorial is work in progress, so check it out from time to time. The tutorial is based on a real life use-case.

If you have less time check out the regular tutorial that demonstrates how Camel easily work well together with Spring for message exchanges over JMS.

If you have questions about Camel then please check out the forums/mailinglists.

And then the answer to the mother of all questions about Camel.

There's tons of stuff in there. One of the most trivial changes to implement but one of my 'DOH why didn't we do that a long time ago' changes is the new tracer; very handy! Great work camel riders!

Incidentally its interesting to see how popular Camel is getting. For example looking at the Apache mailing list activity at nabble there's currently ActiveMQ in first place, ServiceMix in second and Camel doing a pretty respectable 7th behind Wicket, Maven, Struts and Lucene. Pretty good - particularly as its way above all of the Incubator projects combined (including a fair few that have graduated a while ago :), all Apache Web Services projects combined, Tomcat and Gerornimo etc

ActiveMQ, Camel and ServiceMix are doing pretty well in the Java software community rankings too

Are people blogging less?

Maybe its a bug with google reader or something but for the first time in ages my great and good folders of feeds I track (my kinda 2 tier way of keeping on top of blogs) are nearly empty. Do folks just twitter now or something?

Setting your bash command prompt to subversion or git repo info

I love this tip to set your bash command prompt to the svn/git repo, branch and version - its installed. Neat!

TimeCapsule & TimeMachine saved my ass!

My MacBookPro died on me. It kinda kept freezing so I did a hard reboot then after that it wouldn't boot at all :) Took it to the Apple Store; they figured out it was some kinda disc corruption; so wiped the disk (after managing to restore the files I was hacking on, bless that genius at the bar), reinstalled Leopard and things are OK (the disk may be faulty, we'll see soon).

Luckily the TimeCapsule had all my stuff so I could use the Migration Assistant to restore my apps & user accounts from the backup on the Time Machine. The UI did freak me out a bit - when the thing started it kept saying 'connecting...' then hanging for ages. I kept thinking it wasn't working so trying all kinds of things. Turns out, its just wacky slow. The next screen shows the list of user accounts - again thats wacky slow - takes maybe an hour for a 100Gb backup to show the few user accounts in the backup!

The 2 massive delays in the UI are kinda irritating; I mean why can't it keep a little index of what machines & users its got in the backup and let me pick 'em in a second then leave the thing for a few hours while it restores?

Anyway - all is well - once I got past the 2nd screen, chose the things to restore I left it chugging away for a few hours and I'm now restored. The only thing I've missed so far is I had to reinstall my VPN client as it shoved stuff in /System and maven is hardwired in /usr/bin to point to mvn 2.0.6 in /usr/share - other than that it worked fine.

One final tip if you try and restore from Time Capsule/Time Machine; when you reinstall Leopard don't create a user account with the same ID as the one you are gonna restore - as the Migration Assistant forced me to rename the restored one (which caused some problems that took me a little while and some 'chown'ing to fix :).

Other than those little gremlins; nice job Apple! If I ever have another catastrophic failure, the next restore should be pretty painless

I'm liking JAX-RS and Jersey

A great post by Paul Sandoz on MVCJ. Jersey rocks!

I'm loving the simple JAX-RS POJO based programming model (quite Rails-ish) for writing controllers and models which work beautifully in a hi-RESTful way which also now support a rails-like way of implicit templates via JSP/Velocity/whatever with a minimal amount of fuss.

I'm liking the controller-is-the-model-facade option with implicit MVC too; so the model is totally decoupled from the web and the controller just has a few annotations to deal with binding methods nicely to the URI/REST/content types and so forth - then you can have as many representations of a model as you want - just write views (e.g. index.jsp, detail.jsp, brief.jsp or whatever). Lovely and Rails-ish

Its now pretty easy to write hi-rest web apps in Java which render content as (X)HTML, XML, JSON with nice RESTful content negotiation and using good URIs.

Apache ActiveMQ 5.1 and Apache ServiceMix Kernel 1.0-m3 Released!

Apache ActiveMQ 5.1.0 is now out. Both Bruce and Hiram cover this nicely - if you use ActiveMQ I'd recommend upgrading, its got tons of bug fixes.

Also things are really hotting up in the spiffy new OSGi based ServiceMix Kernel that has just released 1.0-m3. Both Guillaume and Bruce have the low down. Grab it while its hot!

Hopefully soon ActiveMQ may come built on ServiceMix Kernel by default which will certainly really help make it easy to hot-redeploy Enterprise Integration Patterns routing rules within the broker.

Squawk (simple queues using awk)

I loved this article on using awk to work with message queues (via Apache ActiveMQ) by Andrew Birkett. Just shows you can be unixy and enterprisey at the same time :).

Getting hooked on twitter

For a while I kept seeing twitter being mentioned and kinda thought: why would I wanna know what some random person on the internet had for lunch?

I just didn't get it. I'm not totally sure I do get it yet - but I've kinda convinced myself of twitter by just thinking of it as an open IRC where you subscribe to people rather than chat rooms.

To use messaging middleware speak, I've not been the biggest fan of IM as it tends to lead to loads of point-to-point conversations with lots of duplication. I find myself saying the same thing again and again to people on IM. Plus IM feels way too invasive; I tend to hide away from IM to avoid getting hassled these days :). With IRC I can say stuff to the room instead which avoids me having to say the same thing again. Plus IRC tends to feel less invasive; I can read it when I feel like it but otherwise kinda ignore it

Twitter so far is kinda feeling like a combination of blogs, IRC and SMS; where you subscribe to people rather than rooms which helps cut down the noise. If someone's getting annoying or boring, just stop following them. The brevity of posts (140 characters) also helps trim down the noise and fluff leaving a mostly interesting stream of kinda mini-blog-posts and banter. So far I'm hooked! :)

If you are on OS X try out twitterific as a Twitter client. While IM is a pretty reasonable way to work with twitter - I do like not running my IM client and using twitterific instead :)

If you have an iphone there's a bunch of clients available; so far I'm liking twinkle

Feel free to follow me if you like. Also check out twubble as a great way to find new folks to follow - nice work crazybob!

Google AppEngine is very impressive!

After never having hacked any python before or looked closely at django and never having used BigTable, I spent a little over a day and managed to hack up, what is (to me anyway!)- is a very useful little web app I've wanted for a long time: http://latrz.appspot.com. Its highly scalable & available and resilient thanks to BigTable. Its kinda amazing really.

Sure Amazon has lots of similar stuff at the bits and bytes level. EC2, S3, SimpleDB and the new file system stuff are cool too, don't get me wrong. For some things the power and flexibility of the Amazon offerings are great. 

Though for creating web apps I love how AppEngine takes all the hassle out of figuring out how to host, load balance, deploy and manage your app. I didn't have to mess with elastic IPs or DNS or web proxies or figure out some load balancing stuff, get scalr to work or install some ninja unix file system into a vmware image that mirrors itself onto S3 or anything. I just hacked up some simple python on my laptop, tested it locally with the AppEngine SDK, typed a command into my terminal (while on a train :) and within seconds its live on googles infrastructure and working really well.

I guess some web developers are gonna push back on the use of python but I'm sure google will release Java / JavaScript flavours of AppEngine soon making it not much of an issue. Who knows maybe even PHP too - not sure about Ruby though, I dunno if they've figured out how to make a ruby sandbox yet.

I'm sure ultimately this is gonna be a big game changer for those making public web applications; it takes so much hassle out of making web apps - and makes creating highly scalable & available web apps very rapid & fun. Well done googlers; I'm very impressed.

Latrz - a handy web app for reading stuff later (latrz)

I've wanted something like this for the longest time! I've found when surfing, chatting online, working with email that I keep stumbling on loads of links to interesting stuff I wanna read - but just not right now - later.

I've often kept open loads of FireFox windows for stuff I should read soon (which then means I struggle to find what I am currently reading/working on from stuff I wanna read later). Then I've been through phases of cutting and pasting interesting articles into files/wikis for later. I've always felt this was sucky and wanted a nicer solution.

Now there's latrz and I confess to being totally hooked already :).

Basically if I'm on a page I know I wanna read, I click the Read Latrz bookmarket, then close the browser or carry on doing what I'm doing. Then when I've time I just click on the latrz site to read whatever takes my fancy, then mark it as read when I'm done to remove it from my reading list.

Go on, give it a try or subscribe to the Latrz Blog, you know you want to :)

Using Scala to create a better Camel DSL for Enterprise Integration Patterns

Gert Vanthienen has been doing some amazing work creating a DSL for Camel using Scala. I'm amazed at how neat and concise it is. Go Gert! :).

I'd previously experimented with Groovy and Ruby DSLs and found them to be little more verbose (e.g. having issues of needing to pass 2 closures/blocks to methods like when or filter, one for the predicate and one for the block to execute if its true).

You can grab his slides from the recent ApacheCon talk. I'm really liking it. The Scala use of separate syntax for functions/predicates and blocks helps improve the Camel DSL hugely

Apache Camel 1.3.0 released with 208 new features & improvements

Its taken a while to get there but we've finally got the new Camel 1.3.0 Release out of the door which includes 208 new features, improvements and bug fixes described below. Also as David has blogged recently we've MSMQ support now along with Esper and an Esper Demo. Many thanks to all those who helped ride this beast out the door. Enjoy!

• improved Bean Integration
• improved testing via Spring Testing along with the Mock, Test, DataSet components
• browsing of endpoints via the BrowsableEndpoint with support in the JMS, List, Mock, SEDA and VM components
• improved support for message exchange patterns such as InOut for JMS
• various improvements in CXF, iBatis, Jetty, MINA components
• improved XPath and XQuery support in Spring XML and with easier namespace configuration
• default to more efficient JMS usage when working with Spring 2.5.x to avoid a previous Spring bug
• various improvements in the DSL and with error handling
• improved automatic Type Converter implementations
• method invocations now supported in EL expressions
• CXF transport API now supported in CXF component, you could leverage the power of Camel mediation in Apache CXF

New Components

• AMQP
• DataSet for easier load testing
• JCR for JSR 170 support
• List for UI and tooling integration
• Stream for working with input/output streams
• Test for easier functional testing
• XQuery for easy XQuery based transforms for Templating

New Data Formats

• CSV
• XmlBeans
• XStream

New Languages

• Bean Language
• JXPath

New Enterprise Integration Patterns

• Load Balancer
• Routing Slip

Please see Release Notes for more details. Download it now while is hot to trot!