Architectural advice for Apache Camel and C

Question

I'm experimenting a bit with Apache Camel to propose it to my boss as an "ESB solution" which he is pushing for. Camel looks like a nice project, and a good way to keep away from more heavyweight stuff.

We've got a low-level layer implemented in C which listens to network events and is supposed to trigger some demo Camel route. Which is the best way to do such integration? I was thinking of JMS and STOMP protocol, unfortunately its C client library looks funny (you have to compile it on XCode, for one).

Have you got any alternatives to suggest?

Answer 1

Finally I resorted to using a Java Gateway which receives internal IPC calls using a native library provided by our vendor (HP Tandem NonStop mainframes) and translates them to JMS messages towards a demo broker running on my PC.

(My first step was actually to use HttpEndpoint).

Good advice also about low-level socket libraries in Java, we need some tuning to avoid weird behavior by standard network libraries on NonStop.

Answer 2

there are several components that allow Camel to interface with other (non-Java) applications. off the top, camel-jetty, camel-jms, camel-file and camel-amqp all provide this easily. that being said, I'm not a C guy, so I'm not sure the best choice from that perspective...

If you are just preparing a demo, just use define an HTTP endpoint (using camel-jetty) to kick off your demo route. As you progress, you can switch to something more robust (JMS, etc) for messaging between the two...

Answer 3

Camel has some components (camel-netty, camel-mina) which can provide lower level socket interaction. You may consider to use them to talk to your system.