Enterprise Java

Apache Camel 3.2 – Reflection free configuration of Camel

At the Apache Camel project we are working towards the next upcoming Apache Camel 3.2.0 release, which is planned for next month.

One of the ares we have worked hard on in Camel 3 is to make it smaller and faster. And one aspect of this is also configuration management. You can fully configure Camel in many ways and according to the 12 factor principles, to keep configuration separated from the application. A popular way to configure is to use properties files (eg application.properties) or in Kubernetes you can configure from config maps or environment variables as well.

So we have gradually over Camel 3.0, 3.1 and now 3.2 made configuration faster. With the latest work we are now fully reflection free.

Camel is capable of reporting when reflection based configuration are being used. Which can be configured with:

# bean introspection to log reflection based configuration

camel.main.beanIntrospectionExtendedStatistics=true

camel.main.beanIntrospectionLoggingLevel=INFO

We have prepared the camel-example-main-tiny to report this. The numbers for Camel 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2 are as follows:

Camel 3.0: BeanIntrospection invoked: 12 times

Camel 3.1: Stopping BeanIntrospection which was invoked: 11 times

Camel 3.2: Stopping BeanIntrospection which was invoked: 0 times

What this means is that you can fully configure all your Camel endpoints, components, routes, EIPs, data formats, languages, camel main, camel context, and whatnot, in declarative properties files etc and then at runtime all of this ends up invoking the actual setter methods on all these instances (ie just direct java method calls, no java.lang.reflect).

This is possible because we source code generate configurer classes based on what options are present. And these configurer classes are reflection free. There can be many options so it would be impossible to implement this by hand, see for example the kafka endpoint configurer.

And btw another feature coming in Camel 3.2 is that we made all of the components options available for configuration, before we didn’t include nested configuration options. And if you do not like configuring in properties files, then we have type-safe component-dsl and endpoint-dsl as well.

Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Claus Ibsen, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Apache Camel 3.2 – Reflection free configuration of Camel

Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own.

Claus Ibsen

Claus Ibsen is a principal software engineer from Red Hat. Claus is working full time as Apache Camel committer. And is author of the "Camel in Action" book.
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