Video of Panel Discussion about Java Past, Present and Future with great experts in the Java world

In March 2016 I was speaking at Riga Dev Day 2016 about fabric8 Camel microservices for Docker & Kubernetes.

Later that day there was a Panel Discussion with some of the speakers talking about Java Past, Present and Future. Somehow I got myself into that panel (they may had a cancellation or something, and just grab the Camel guy for the empty seat). Thank you Riga Dev Day for having me on the seat along side great minds like Anton Archipov.

The video of that panel is now posted online on youtube.

It was great fun to be on the panel, and if I remember then I am pushing for Java to be smaller, slimmer and has less footprint so its more ready for tomorrows/todays world of container based platforms.

Apache Camel 2.18 - Highlights of what is coming

The Camel riders are busy working on the upcoming Apache Camel 2.18 release. As we update the release notes on the fly, its a way of quickly looking at what is coming.

I just wanted to do a quick update here in the summer what we have done so far with the highlights in short form. More elaborate details to come when a release is getting closer and the documentation improves.


Java 8
Apache Camel 2.18 is the first release that is requiring Java 8 as the runtime. I have previously blogged about that. So all the build and source code has been changed to compile as Java 8, and we have started using Java 8 code style with lambdas in new code (not in existing code as we backport fixes to older versions).


Netflixx OSS
We have new components that integrate Camel with the Netflixx OSS stack such as Hysterix and Ribbon.

which is integrated with the Hystrix dashboard.

And there is also a Zipkin component for distributed message tracing.

Service Call
We have introduced a service call EIP to abstract and making calling external services from Camel easy. The idea is that you can call a remote services the same way regardless where the service is hosted. Camel will lookup the service from a service registry of choice, such as from kubernetes, openshift, cloud foundry, zuul, consul, zookeeper or whatever.


Spring Boot
Running Camel on Spring Boot has been improved.

Camel is now available in the Spring starter website.

.. and Camel is now also on the WildFly Swarm website as well.

Camel now exposes a health indicator if spring boot health actuator is enabled

All Camel components and data formats now provide auto configuration options (with documentation) you can configure from tooling (we are pondering how to do similar for endpoint options).

And its all auto generated from the source code, so when a new option is added its automatic included in the next release.


Component documentation
We are in the process of migrating the Camel documentation from wiki to ascii docs files that are included in the source code, so we can generate a new website and documentation. This also allows us to keep the documentation automatic up to date from the source code. Huge thanks to Andrea Cosentino who has patiently done most of the migration, which is a labor intensive process.


New components
And as usual there is a number of new components. Currently we have 8 new for you.


Apache Camel 2.18 is targeted to be released after the summer vacation, around September timeframe.