How to use fuse releases when you can't wait for Apache releases

The release cycle for Apache sometimes tend to be a bit long. Apache Camel 1.5.0 was released in october 2008. If you cant wait for a new release, you can try out the fuse releases. They are free to use and requires no license fees or whatsoever.

Fuse releases have a constant and stable release cycle. We release a stable and proven version once a month. All releases is published in our open maven repository that is open for everyone to use. More information about why is here.

Lets try it out with an example. We use the part-five.zip from the lengthy tutorial as an example.

All we have to do is:
1) Setup maven repository location
2) Change version
3) Test

Ad 1)
First we need to add the fuse maven repository. So we insert these lines into our pom.xml file:

<repositories>
<repository>
<id>FUSESource</id>
<name>FUSESource Repository</name>
<url>http://repo.fusesource.com/maven2</url>
</repository>
</repositories>

<pluginRepositories>
<pluginRepository>
<id>FUSESource</id>
<name>FUSESource Repository</name>
<url>http://repo.fusesource.com/maven2</url>
</pluginRepository>
</pluginRepositories>

Ad 2)
Then we need to change the use the fuse releases, and that is very simple as you just need to change the version.

Apache Camel 1.5.0 should be replaced with 1.5.4.0-fuse
Apache CXF 2.1.3 should be replaced with 2.1.3.3-fuse

As we configure our pom.xml to use properties we just need to change this in a single location:

<properties>
<cxf-version>2.1.3.3-fuse</cxf-version>
<jetty-version>6.1.9</jetty-version>
<camel-version>1.5.4.0-fuse</camel-version>
</properties>

Ad 3)
Then we are ready to go. So we fire the maven command:
mvn clean install

And it should start downloading all the fuse artifacts and after a while run the unit tests.

Then we can fire up jetty with:
mvn jetty:run

And it should log on the console, the camel version:
Apache Camel 1.5.4.0-fuse (CamelContext:camel) started


Thats it