Comments on: Synapse vs Camel

By: Paul Fremantle

Paul Fremantle — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:26:20 +0000

Dmitry

Please can you contact me. I’d really like to help resolve your issues and change your experience with Synapse.

Paul Fremantle pzf@apache.org
Apache Synapse

By: Dmitry

Dmitry — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:09:10 +0000

We where unlucky ones to bring synapse 1.2 into production as a message router and file transfer mechanism.

It is really hard to express our frustration and suffer we had and still having with it. We view Synapse project as a mistake from the beginning which shouldn’t be existing at the first place. WSO2 1.7.1 which we actually running is nothing more then a prove of concept.

We had some cases message been lost _completely_, even in the archive folder, we had a case an archiving feature of VFS deleted all files it can from archive folder due to not obvious misconfiguration (trailing question mark in Uri string). Some exception during mediation eg. JMSSender not even fires a fault sequence resulting message just gone forever. It has no transactional support, once it gets the message off the queue you are on your on in the ocean alone with your luck.
Smooks mediator is not working, authors admitted its a POC, failover endpoint will fail on JMSSender exception resulting message been not delivered. If proxy is off on sturtup, the receiving vfs transport will polls directory anyway resulting in complete unrecoverable loss of file due to the proxy service is “attempting to access an inactive service”. WebSphere JMS link suddenly stopped working with exception in BaseUtils.handleLegacyMessage resulting in unrecoverable loss of JMS message.
Is short, it full of holes, very disanointing and nothing but a funny demo.

In contrary Camel looks solid, powerful and compact but has no GUI. We hope to have time to migrate to Camel.

By: William Henry

William Henry — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:24:28 +0000

Really useful comparison Rajith. IT would be worth updating every 6 months or so. Or for major changes.

William

By: Debbie Moynihan

Debbie Moynihan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:53:48 +0000

Rajith,
how are you? I just wanted to say this was a nice write-up - it is helpful to see a comparison from someone who has taken a look at both Camel and Synapse.

Debbie

By: rajith

rajith — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:53:24 +0000

James,

Thanks for the comments. I appreciate it.
I will update the article with the points you mentioned.

Regards,

Rajith

By: James Strachan

James Strachan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:53:48 +0000

BTW a massive difference between Synapse and Camel is that Camel has been designed from the ground up to work great inside a JMS broker or a JBI based ESB or a web services stack; so Camel has amazing JMS and JBI support.

By: James Strachan

James Strachan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:52:01 +0000

Great article! BTW a couple of corrections on the Camel side of things…

* you can use Camel to do protocol switching from any protocol to any protocol with whatever EIP patterns in between (e.g. Message Translator etc). e.g. from(”activemq:SomeQueue”).to(”ftp://somehost/somedir”);
* Camel supports non blocking HTTP too BTW
* its trivial to deploy Camel inside any Spring or WAR application or as an OSGi bundle, working great with Spring Dynamic Modules
* yes Camel has a similar WS-* strategy; using CXF to support the SOAP/WS-* protocols on any endpoint. e.g. from(”soap:activemq:SomeQueue”).to(”soap:xmpp:localhost”) etc
* yes Camel has support for load balancing, throttling, resequencing etc. See http://activemq.apache.org/camel/enterprise-integration-patterns.html
* for stateful replication, we rely on ActiveMQ’s Message Groups feature or using EJB3
* for payload conversion Camel has a large range of Data Formats as well as a sophisticated type conversion library