Technology selection guide

ServiceMix 4 offers a set of different messaging and integration technologies:

  • ActiveMQ

  • Camel

  • CXF

  • JBI

  • NMR

Depending on the solution you're building, you want to select one or more of these technologies. Below are some guidelines to help you pick the right mix for your problem.

When to use Camel?

For any integration scenario, we recommend to start as simple as possible. Camel allows you to build routes for integration scenario's quickly and efficiently. You can deploy these routes directly on ServiceMix by deploying the plain Spring XML route or by packaging the route in an OSGi bundle.

As you need more (advanced) features, start combining Camel with ActiveMQ, CXF and/or the NMR

When to use ActiveMQ?

ActiveMQ is a JMS message broker, featuring support for clustering, pluggable persistence mechanism, master-slave configuration for failover, ...

ServiceMix 4 includes an instance of the ActiveMQ broker, which can be combined with Camel to provide easy-to-use message persistence and reliable messaging.

After setting up multiple instances of ActiveMQ (or ServiceMix 4) on the network, you can configure ActiveMQ clustering or master-slave mode to allow for a more reliable and scalable set-up.

When to use CXF?

CXF is an open-source services framework that you can use to suit your WS-* standards integration needs. It allows you to use common programming APIs like JAX-RS or JAX-WS for building your own services and to expose them to the outside world.

You can use CXF from within your Camel routes with the Camel CXF component.

When to use NMR?

The NMR provides the basic ESB features for ServiceMix 4. You can use it to connect multiple camel routes in a lightweight way. It can also be used as a common transport on which you can add container-level auditing by registering your own ExchangeListener implementation.

When to use JBI?

We still support JBI 1.0 in ServiceMix 4 so you can leverage your previous investments and move your existing JBI artifacts from ServiceMix 3 to the new container with no/minimal changes before migrating them to use Camel and/or CXF directly. For new projects, you should consider JBI deprecated and always use Camel and/or CXF inside ServiceMix instead.