Getting Started with Apache Camel

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: How to Achieve Project Success with the Guidewire Integration Ecosystem

With the introduction of Integration Gateway, Guidewire is leveraging the rich, open-source community surrounding Apache Camel to help ensure successful P&C core system implementations. This year, the Camel project turns 15 years old. During that time, it has not only demonstrated its ability to enable the most demanding enterprise integration requirements but has also garnered a tremendous following of practitioners and developers. As the stats from 2021 show, Camel continues to rank in the top 10 of Apache projects by number of commits.

Not experienced with Apache Camel and want to know where to start? No problem – we have you covered!

Apache Camel Learning Resources for Developers

Guidewire Education has just introduced a new course for practitioners covering Integration Gateway. After an introduction, the course covers building apps in Apache Camel as well as the development and deployment lifecycle provided by the service. To take the course, log in to the Guidewire Education portal and search for “Integration Gateway.”

For easily accessible and inexpensive online courses, check out Udemy and Pluralsight. There are many good options here, but on Udemy we recommend Learn Apache Camel Framework with Spring Boot, and on Pluralsight we recommend Introduction to Integration with Apache Camel.

The de facto handbook for practitioners is Camel in Action, Second Edition, by Claus Ibsen and Jonathan Anstey (Manning Publications). This book has plenty of guidance and best practices for developing and managing integrations. If you follow only one piece of advice from this post, we recommend getting this book.

Don’t forget the Apache Camel community. Of course, this is where user documentation is hosted, including the Apache Component references for hundreds of community integration components. But it also links you to many other community resources, including integration examples on GitHub and countless articles published across the web.

Red Hat, which is one of the biggest contributors to Camel as part of its Fuse product, offers its own comprehensive Camel education and certification courses, as well as many community resources and tools to use with Camel.

If you’re interested in enterprise integration concepts — including recognized best practices for integration patterns — look no further than Enterprise Integration Patterns, the seminal 2003 work by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. This book first reflected and then shaped the integration space for decades to come. Apache Camel and many leading integration vendors have used these patterns as a template for implementing their integration tools.

Still have a technical problem you can’t solve? Visit Stack Overflow and search for the [apache-camel] tag.

I hope these resources help. Happy integrating!

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About the Author
Chris Vavra

Chris Vavra

Senior Director, Product Management, Ecosystem Enablement

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