Apache Camel 3.17 has just been released.
This release introduces a set of new features and noticeable improvements that we will cover in this blog post.
Java 17 (runtime) support
Camel 3.17 is the first release where we have official support for Java 17, really easy to remember :) That said, the Java 17 support is runtime only, meaning that we do not add special support for new Java 17 language features such as Java records.
Camel Main
We have improved the startup summary to list used configurations for auto-configuration and property placeholders when running Camel standalone via camel-main.
The information displayed will show the source for each configuration; in other words you can exactly see if the configuration is from application.properties, OS environment variable, command line argument, or elsewhere.
Camel JBang (Camel CLI)
In this release we have focused the most new development on the effort for Camel JBang. This is a new way of getting started and using Apache Camel.
Users that are familiar with Camel K and its “ease of use”, then we are taking that same user experience to everyone; without the need for a Kubernetes platform.
Having JBang installed, then you can easily run a Camel application from a terminal. At first install Camel into JBang so you can run using the camel command:
jbang app install camel@apache/camel
Then you can quickly create a new basic Camel integration use the init command:
camel init hello.java
And run the file (use ctrl + c to stop):
camel run hello.java
We made it easy to run existing examples directly loaded from GitHub:
camel run https://github.com/apache/camel-kamelets-examples/tree/main/jbang/hello-java
And we also made it easy to download the example to local disk, so you can edit the source and see live updates, using the init command:
camel init https://github.com/apache/camel-kamelets-examples/tree/main/jbang/hello-java
And then you can run in developer mode (--dev) with live reloading on source changes (on save):
camel run * --dev
We continue our effort on Camel JBang for the upcoming 3.18 LTS release.
There is a lot more that Camel JBang can do, so make sure to see the Camel JBang documentation. There you can also find information how to get JBang installed, and after that install the camel app in JBang.
Component Headers
We completed the work of documenting every header’s of all supported components.
This means you can see in the website documentation what headers a component consumer or producer uses, and their purpose.
This information is also available for tooling. For example the Camel IDEA plugin supports this and can do code assistance in your Camel routes.
Resume from Offset
This release adds experimental support for pausable Kafka consumers. Under certain error conditions, it is now possible to pause the Kafka consumer so that consumption can be further resumed once the conditions on the integration are adequate. Please check the Resume API documentation for details.
Experimental support for resume operations was added to the following components in this release: camel-atom, camel-rss, camel-cassandraql and camel-couchbase.
Java DSL in Camel K
The camel-java-joor-dsl used by Camel K, and Camel JBang, now supports compiling all Java sources in the same compilation unit, meaning they have the same classloader visibility and can use dependency injection among themselves.
Camel YAML DSL
The YAML parser now have precise source:line error reporting, meaning you can see exactly where there is a problem.
Load properties from vault/secrets cloud services
We added support for Azure key vault service. See more details at the following blog post
Camel Kafka
We did other bug fixes, and we continue to make the camel-kafka component more robust. In particular, we fixed issues related to concurrency as well as resume API related issues. To simplify the code maintainance, we also simplified the way the code tracks the last processed offset. We added support for kafka transaction in producer and it can work with transacted(). It would commit the transaction or abort it if there is an Exception throwing or the exchange is marked with RollbackOnly. It can not be used in multi threads since kafka transaction does not support it right now. Also kafka transaction does not support JTA/XA spec, so there is still a risk with the data consistency when combining with some XA resources (SQL or JMS).
New Components
There are three new components:
- camel-azure-key-vault - Manage secrets and keys in Azure Key Vault Service
- camel-debezium-db2 - Capture changes from a DB2 database
- camel-debezium-oracle - Capture changes from a Oracle database
Spring Boot
We have upgraded to the latest Spring Boot 2.6 release.
Added more unit tests to various starter JARs to increase the QA of this project.
Upgrading
Make sure to read the upgrade guide if you are upgrading from a previous Camel version.
Release Notes
You can find more information about this release in the list of JIRA tickets resolved in the release: