Recently I encountered a problem related to integration with some third party APIs. These days it is pretty common to outsource some activity for a company, integrating with social networking website, integration with third party tools installed on company premises.
These tools can be built on various technologies and integration between different component becomes an issue when people start writing code for individual component and do not target integration as one cohesive process.
Result is cluttered tightly coupled development based on many assumptions. Necessity is to take a comprehensive uniform approach to tackle this problem.
Various open source ESB and commercial solutions are available for this but in my experience I have found that using an ESB right away is a difficult thing for developers to accept.
So approach should be slowly introduce the concept of Enterprise Integration Patterns into core modules and let people learn the concept and admire them.
Apache Camel is an out of the box solution which implements all patterns described in EIP and provides integration with many more components which can help developers by avoiding pain of boilerplate code.
Patterns are a proven way of building robust scalable and easy maintenance software and following them religiously can make a developer’s life easier and make organization save huge amount of money in long term.
Camel not only provides implementation of these EIP but more importantly it’s syntax is so fluent that it brings a paradigm shift the way one writes integration code.
It is an important framework to learn for a Java developer and I do not find any direct alternative in Microsoft world.
In the next article we will try to develop a small application for building a fault tolerant application using Apache Camel
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