The 2.9 release is a record breaking release with about 500 JIRA tickets resolved since the 2.8 released 5 months ago.
Here is a break down of 10 of the most noticeable improvements and new features:
1. JAR dependencies reduced. The camel-core JAR now only depend on the API from slf4j. On top of that about 15 components, no longer depends on Spring JARs.
I have previously blogged about this.
2. The Simple language has been overhauled and has a much improved syntax parser, which gives precise error details, what is wrong. You can now also have embedded functions inside functions as well. And we have unary operators, such as ++ to easily increment counters. I also started experimenting with ternary operators, so expect Conditional and the Elvis operator to be introduced in the future :)
I have previously blogged about this.
3. The Bean Component has been much improved as well. Now you can define bindings explicit in the method name option, to fully 100% decouple your bean code from Camel, when using more complicated bindings. Likewise you can pass in values such as literals, numbers, booleans etc as well. The bean component can now also invoke static methods directly, as well invoking private class beans if an interface exists.
I have previously blogged about this.
4. Splitting big XML files in a streaming mode with low memory footprint is now possible. There is a tokenizer solution, that is pure String based by scanning tokens. And another solution to use the StAX and JAXB APIs. The former requires no JAXB bindings, as required by the latter solution.
I have previously blogged about these two solutions [1] and [2].
5. More cloud components. We now have 2 new AWS components for Simple Email Service, and Simple DB. There is also a new JClouds component.
6. Using request-reply over JMS with fixed reply queues now supports a new exclusive option which performs faster, than the default assumed shared queue. Likewise the JMS consumer supports a new asyncConsumer option, to allow the JMS consumer to leverage the asynchronous non-blocking routing engine. All good stuff that if enabled can make JMS goes faster under certain use-cases.
7. Added a new number of JMX annotations to allow custom components to easily expose custom JMX attributes and operations. We also have JMX load statistics on the ManagedCamelContext MBean which is similar to the unix top command, which has average load stats for the last 1-minute, 5-minutes, and 15-minutes.
8. The camel-cxf component now supports OSGi blueprint configuration for the CXF-RS as well.
9. There is a number of new Apache Karaf Camel commands for further managing your Camel applications from the command shell.
10. And as usual there is a lot of minor improvements and bug fixes as well. For example the file/ftp components now support the sendEmptyMessageWhenIdle to .. yeah send an empty message when there was no files to poll. Likewise the script and language components now more easily allow to load scripts from file/classpath. And the Camel Test Kit, now have more juice for swapping endpoints before unit testing, which makes it easier to swap real endpoints with mocks and whatnot without touching your route code in the tests.
And we have as usual upgraded to the latest and greatest of 3rd party libraries, such as Apache CXF 2.5.1, Groovy 1.8.5, Jackson 1.9.2, AWS 1.2.12, Spring 3.0.6, and JPA2 etc.
You can see more details at the 2.9 release notes, such as details about other improvements and bug fixes etc.
Reference: Apache Camel 2.9 Released – Top 10 Changes from our JCG partner Claus Ibsen at the Claus Ibsen riding the Apache Camel blog.
