Camelize a spring boot application

Question

We have a spring boot application that is growing in complexity because of integration needs - like send an email after you do this, or broadcast a jms message after you that etc. In looking for some higher level abstractions, I came across apache camel (haven't used camel ever before). The question that I have is what do I do with the spring boot application? The application has the standard spring controllers, services and uses spring-data for connecting to databases. I didn't find much help online on how to merge camel into a spring-boot restful application. Is that even something that is doable or is camel a completely different beast that the spring boot won't fit?

I did read that Camel tightly integrates with Spring, but still I didn't know if 1) Spring Controllers are still something that can be used along with Camel 2) If I can call the other spring beans from camel routes and whether I can call invoke a camel route from a spring bean (sorry if these sound like camel newbie questions to the experts)

As an example of what we have to do:

1. After finishing writing anything to the database about an order, we have to send an email out to the order processing department
2. If someone deletes a particular user address, we have to send to a jms topic so other applications can take action.

Every http request is coming in through the Spring MVC stack today.

Is there a way to "hand-off" the processing to camel after a particular task is complete? (like writing the order to the database successfully via the Spring MVC stack and hand off to camel to send a jms message and do other things)? Or should we completely replace Spring with Camel?

Not sure what the right path is. Can someone please guide us?

Answer 1

This question is slightly old, but though it was worth mentioning here that Apache Camel now includes a Spring Boot component.

Details can be found here
http://camel.apache.org/spring-boot.html
and they document an example here
http://camel.apache.org/spring-boot-example.html

Follow this for the current best practice in camelising a spring boot application!