Documenting Camel Routes

Question

I have several Camel contexts in my project and i would like to document the routes if possible in a reverse engineering fashion since we want to keep the documentation up to date related to the context. what would be the best approach?

Answer 1

We tend to actually design the routes up front and model them using the iconography from the EIP book. That gives us a guide to then test drive our routes. Are your routes changing really often that reverse engineering is required? We are slowly looking at building a dynamic UI for our routes - but that won't be until will into 2011 :)

Answer 2

You can just add documentation in the actual DSL and then have some tooling or whatever that extracts that route and documentation.

In the Spring XML DSL you ought to be able to add elements to the EIPs in the route. Also you can also add general XML comments as well.

Also as mentioned above some GUI tooling is also what some people want to use. Then often the visual diagram of the routes using the EIP icons is the documentation.

FuseSource is current building a GUI tool called FuseSource Rider. It will be in public beta later this month.

At Apache Camel there is some maven tooling for generating gui diagrams http://camel.apache.org/visualisation.html