One of the most frequently requested use cases that I encounter out in the field is to ingest file-based data (batch or otherwise), and then validate, transform, process, store… it. Luckily, Apache Camel’s File and FTP components make this extremely easy. So much so, that it requires very little thought to get up and running. And if you’re consuming small numbers of larger batch files, perhaps the defaults are good enough and you don’t need to put much though into it. If, however, you’re consuming large numbers of smaller files and you want to get the highest possible performance, there are a few configurations that you might want to consider.

Usually when a customer has some legacy/native code that they need to invoke from Camel (or any Java program really), I recommend that they expose it via SOAP, REST, or some other standardized remote invocation mechanism. Then they can just call it with the appropriate Camel Component. While I still think that this is best option, I recently had a customer ask if Camel had the ability to call native code directly. So I figured what the heck… might as well blog about it…

LoadBalancing is a fairly well-known concept these days. There are a ton of existing strategies out there (ie, RoundRobin, Random, Sticky, Weighted, …), and there a ton of existing implementations that have been built using both hardware and software (ie, Apache HTTPD, HAProxy, f5, Layer7, …). So why create another one? Well… although it’s not likely to be very useful, I thought it might be neat to see if I could make one that utilized CPU load (or any metric) to do more intelligent routing.

There are many reasons why someone might need to decommision a JBoss A-MQ broker. Perhaps you are taking a server down for maintenance. Maybe you’re trying to do an upgrade. Or maybe you’ve scaled up during a peak period and now need to scale back down. In any case, you likely don’t want the messages that are persisted in that store to be stuck until you bring things back online. And in the case that you don’t plan to bring things back online, you certainly don’t want them to be lost. So what do you do?

When out and about, I often get the question: “How do I setup HA (high availability) with Red Hat’s JBoss Fuse?”. People ask this question and they expect a simple, straightforward answer. And why shouldn’t they? The question is simple enough right? I could ask the same question about something like Tomcat and get a well documented answer involving little more than a loadbalancer. Unfortunately, the answer for Fuse is a bit more involved and usually starts with the annoying response of “it depends”.