Lars Heinemann's Blog

Fuse IDE 2.1 is coming soon...

2012-01-18T10:24:00.000+01:00

Fuse IDE, the Developer Tooling for Apache Camel, ServiceMix and ActiveMQ will be released in version 2.1 soon. We at FuseSource put in a lot of effort to further improve the user experience and features of Fuse IDE.

Some of the new features include...

choice between installing via update site or downloading a full rcp distribution ready to go
designed to work best on Eclipse 3.7 Indigo
replaced use of m2eclipse with m2e which ships with Eclipse 3.7
improved route editor with more clean separation of routes and easier creation of routes
full round tripping for spring and blueprint DSLs
numerous improvements in the Fuse runtime perspective
Fuse Fabric perspective that lets you work with Fuse Fabric from Fuse IDE

Fuse IDE is available as a part of FuseSource Subscription. If you do not have a FuseSource Subscription you may download the trial version for free.

Check our Fuse IDE Beta Update Site or download the Fuse IDE Beta RCP Application to preview what is going to be shipped with Fuse IDE 2.1.

Nice tutorial on Fuse IDE...

2011-03-09T14:28:00.000+01:00

Surfing the web I discovered a nice little tutorial on how to use Fuse IDE for designing a Apache Camel route and deploying it to Apache ServiceMix.

Here are the links to the 2 part tutorial done by Shaun Oosthuizen:

Part 1
Part 2

Thanks for the great tutorial, Shaun.

I also want to mention that Fuse IDE is still in beta phase and we put a lot of effort in that product. A new feature added today is the possibility to launch a route within Eclipse as a local camel context. This can be done via the context menu on a Camel context file or by manually creating a launch configuration for the local camel context. Both should startup a local camel instance and deploy your route there for testing purposes.
We will also provide integration for Apache Karaf and Apache ServiceMix in future releases.

Check the update site often so you will have the latest stuff installed.

Fuse IDE for Camel

2011-02-10T08:40:00.001+01:00

Do you work with Apache Camel? Are you still looking for a visual designer for your routes?

Then this should be interesting news to you...

FuseSource is developing an Eclipse based tool suite called Fuse IDE. In this first version it contains the Fuse IDE for Camel, which enables you to visually create, edit and configure EIP patterns. For this purpose you can leverage the full power of Apache Camel and all of its patterns and components.

Currently we are in the open beta and like to invite people to test it. If you decide to give it a try we would really love to hear your feedback.

Check it out!

Hello FuseSource Team...

2010-10-01T11:25:00.000+02:00

I am happy to announce that I am a new hire at Progress in the FuseSource team since 1st of October 2010 where I will work full time on Apache ServiceMix. So the days of inactivity are now over and I am really back to work on this great project.

I want to thank my former employer, Compart AG, thank you very much for nearly 4 years of good time with great colleagues, interesting and challenging tasks and lots of valuable experience.

Component Updates for ServiceMix

2010-09-10T12:51:00.001+02:00

There are some component updates:

servicemix-mail
Now every aspect of the connection configuration for outgoing emails may be overridden / customized by setting some specific header properties of the normalized message.
Please refer to the components wiki page for detailed information.

servicemix-xmpp
I finished the rework of the servicemix-xmpp component. You can use it now to connect ServiceMix to XMPP rooms or specific participants.
I also updated the components wiki page and setup a small cookbook recipe for better understanding. Feel free to try it out.

servicemix-smpp
Ioannis Canellos submitted a patch for the SMPP component. This patch allows the use of optional parameters. The component wiki will be updated soon.

Back to Open Source Coding...

2010-08-17T14:59:00.001+02:00

After some months of inactivity I am now back on Apache ServiceMix coding.

Currently I am reworking the servicemix-xmpp component in means of easier configuration and to behave like the other components. Hopefully I will be able to finish that component soon so it can be included in upcoming releases.

The servicemix-mail component recently received a patch from the community allowing the overriding of some configuration by setting message properties. I extended that logic a bit so almost every aspect of the connection configuration is customizable by setting the correct message properties. It's not yet in the trunk but I will commit it soon.

There are more upcoming changes but more on that later.

New servicemix-mail cookbook recipe available...

2009-09-04T16:40:00.008+02:00

Yesterday I put some work in creating a new cookbook recipe for the servicemix-mail component. This example will show you how to setup a simple mail forwarding service within Apache ServiceMix.

Feel free to check it out and try yourself. It's really easy...

Again any feedback is welcome.

Improved Servicemix-Mail

2009-08-27T15:35:00.011+02:00

Today I committed a refactored version of the ServiceMix-Mail component (2009.02-SNAPSHOT).

Improvements:
- better attachment recognition
- ability to set the mime type of an outgoing mail
- ability to evaluate the mime type of an incoming mail
- POP users can now process only unseen messages by setting a storage object (this feature was IMAP only before)
- the FROM field of a mail may now be set dynamically via properties of the normalized message
- ...and more...

The component is available as SNAPSHOT here. Happy testing!

Any feedback regarding the component is welcome.

Using Spring Deployment in ServiceMix 4

2009-04-22T06:31:00.010+02:00

After ServiceMix 4 has been released a while ago I think it's time now to do some little hands-on session.

For this session we are going to do a small application reading a file from some input folder and send it to some output folder. Because we are lazy guys we do not want to use the complicated JBI packaging but will go for the new Spring Deployment of ServiceMix 4.

Requirements:
- working ServiceMix 4 installation (download it here)
- some fancy text editor
- some time

Ok, let's start...

Open up your favourite xml editor and create a new file called for example filemover.xml. First of all we need to define some namespaces. We are using the servicemix-file component so we have to add it's namespace definition and also some own namespace for this example. (see below)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"                              
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:osgi="http://www.springframework.org/schema/osgi"           
xmlns:file="http://servicemix.apache.org/file/1.0"
xmlns:example="http://servicemix.apache.org/examples/1.0" 
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd                     
http://www.springframework.org/schema/osgi http://www.springframework.org/schema/osgi/spring-osgi.xsd
http://servicemix.apache.org/file/1.0 http://servicemix.apache.org/file/1.0/servicemix-file.xsd">

That's it for the namespaces. Now we are going to create the endpoints for polling and sending a file. For that you can simply refer to the servicemix-file component wiki.

<!-- file poller endpoint -->
<file:poller service="example:file"
endpoint="pollEndpoint"
autoCreateDirectory="true"
file="${user.home}/smxtest/input/"
targetService="example:file"
period="20000"
delay="40000"
deleteFile="true"
recursive="true">

<property name="marshaler">
<bean class="org.apache.servicemix.components.util.BinaryFileMarshaler" />
</property>

</file:poller>

<!-- file writer endpoint -->
<file:sender service="example:file"
endpoint="sendEndpoint"
append="false"
autoCreateDirectory="true"
directory="${user.home}/smxtest/output/">

<property name="marshaler">
<bean class="org.apache.servicemix.components.util.BinaryFileMarshaler" />
</property>

</file:sender>

You maybe noticed that I am using an environment variable called ${user.home} in the endpoints. Usually that would not work but you can simply add a small bean definition in your xml and this variable gets resolved correctly:

<!-- this has to be here because we need to translate system variables -->
<bean id="propertyConfigurer" class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer" />

Well...we are almost finished. Let's do some final steps now.

If you would put the xml file now into the deploy folder of your Apache ServiceMix 4 folder then the system wouldn't recognize relevant endpoints in there. To export the endpoints to be available inside ServiceMix you need to add another small bean definition to your xml:

<!-- this bean has to be here always, otherwise no endpoints are recognized within this file -->
<bean class="org.apache.servicemix.common.osgi.EndpointExporter" />

Now your endpoints will be made available inside ServiceMix. The small application should work now. You can try to drop it into your deploy folder and watch it booting up. When dropping a file into the input folder it should be moved to the output folder in time.

When doing osgi/list inside your ServiceMix shell you will recognize that your application is listed there with the pure file name. That's somehow not so nice and also you have no information about the bundle vendor and maybe required other bundles inside your application so it would try to start even if some dependencies are not met. To fix that we need to implement some kind of manifest inside your xml file to hold that information.

Doing that is really easy and straight forward as you can specify here all stuff which can be specified in an OSGi bundles manifest file. For our purposes we only specify some basic stuff.

<manifest>
Bundle-Version = 1.0.0
Bundle-Name = Examples :: File Mover Application
Bundle-SymbolicName = org.apache.servicemix.examples.filemover
Bundle-Description = An example which reads a file from an input folder and writes it to an output folder
Bundle-Vendor = lhein@apache.org
Require-Bundle = servicemix-file
</manifest>

You can see that we specified some bundle version which will be listed by osgi/list as well as the bundle name. Via the Require-Bundle key you can define the bundle dependencies for your bundle. For our application servicemix-file is enough. You can put there also more than one value by separating the values with a comma.

Now put the changed version of the xml file into deploy folder and try osgi/list afterwards. You should have some nice bundle name and version now.

Thank you very much for reading this small hands-on tutorial. The complete filemover.xml is available for download here.

servicemix-vfs snapshot available...

2008-12-15T09:14:00.005+01:00

Recently I put on a binding component for VFS. It simply uses commons-vfs for connecting to virtual file systems. Be sure to check out the wiki page for basic instructions on how to use the component.

Want to review it? You can download a snapshot from here.

servicemix-snmp-2008.01 released

2008-11-26T12:01:00.007+01:00

As already written in an earlier post (SNMP binding for Apache ServiceMix) the component was finally released at 20th of november.

Feel free to check it out and also have a look at the component's wiki page: servicemix-snmp

Back to the roots with Gentoo...

2008-11-07T23:39:00.006+01:00

Every once a while I tend to throw my actual linux installation away and try a different one. I already installed Suse, Mandrake, Mint, (K)Ubuntu, ArchLinux, Gentoo and many more. I even had a look at OpenSolaris and some BSD's but nothing made me really feel comfortable with ;)

Now after about 2 years of abstinence from Gentoo I switched back...and somehow it's now like I've never been away. This is by far the distribution I feel most comfortable with. I agree that installing Gentoo is still an adventure and maybe nothing for your computer at work as the installation may take several days depending on your needs but you will end up with an operating system tuned for your special hardware and for your special needs what makes it act quite fast.
No more packages you don't need, a small kernel only containing stuff you need which will make the boot time faster.

So you never heard about Gentoo? You are interested in Linux and not worrying about compiling source packages for hours....then give it a try and maybe you will love it as well.

SNMP binding for Apache ServiceMix

2008-10-20T10:02:00.008+02:00

While working on the tutorial "How to write my own binding component?" I needed to create a realistic use case to work on. So I decided to use the SNMP protocol because ServiceMix still lacks such a binding.

At the weekend I finished up a first version of a SNMP binding component based on the SNMP4J library. It offers a simple polling endpoint which periodically asks a device for some OIDs and sends the polled values as xml document to a defined target service.

Have a look at the component wiki for servicemix-snmp.

Remember, this is only a first shot. There is still much room for improvements.

Apache CXF and timeouts

2008-09-16T08:51:00.008+02:00

We are using Apache CXF inside ServiceMix for webservices. Yesterday I ran into a issue that the client returned from a webservice operation while the operation still ran in ServiceMix. Strange thing I thought and tried to find the cause.

My first approach was to have a look at my webservice SU's and see if I use some timeout values in there for the sending. I didn't find something like this, so I switched to DEBUG log level and gave it another try.

Testing gave me some important facts. The timeout always occured after about 60 seconds, so this seems to be some predefined value and at the time when the client returns there was absolute nothing going on inside the bus, so the cause shouldn't be the ServiceMix itself.

The client seems to be the cause of that behaviour. After doing some searching at Google I found other people ran into this problem as well (as expected). This behaviour is the result of a preset 60 seconds timeout inside the http transport of the client (at least I understood it like this). I saw several suggestions how to solve this but I wasn't able to get it running.

So I gave the cxf irc channel a try and found someone who helped me out with that. Dan Kulp pointed me to the right solution.

It's just about to add a HTTPConduit object with a HTTPClientPolicy. Inside that policy you can configure for example the time out behaviour.

Here is my example code:

MyWebService service = new MyWebService();
MyWebServicePortType client = service.MyWebServicePort();

Client cl = ClientProxy.getClient(client);

HTTPConduit http = (HTTPConduit) cl.getConduit();

HTTPClientPolicy httpClientPolicy = new HTTPClientPolicy();
httpClientPolicy.setConnectionTimeout(0);
httpClientPolicy.setReceiveTimeout(0);

http.setClient(httpClientPolicy);

client.doSomething(...);

Setting the connection timeout and the receive timeout to zero means to wait infinitely having no timeout at all.

So finally I got the problem solved and again many thanks to Dan for helping me out that fast.

Ganymede and SVN...what a mess...

2008-09-08T12:55:00.008+02:00

Today I gave Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) a try.
Most things worked out of the box and after I read something of "included" svn support via Subversive I also wanted to check this.

So I opened the perspective selector and hit the first bad surprise...where is the svn perspective?!? This is not what I would call "integrated subversion support".

I decided to give the "Software Updates" page a try and looked for svn stuff there. Under collaboration I found a "svn team provider"...ok, I will install this one.

Installation succeeded without any problems and the welcome page shows me a "Subversive Overview" headline...so this looks promising so far.
Again I choose the perspective selection page and this time there is a SVN perspective.
Nice, I got it running...So I created my first svn server entry and wanted to check out some sources.

And again it hit me hard and painful...this was the error:

Get repository folder children operation failed.
Selected SVN connector library is not available or cannot be loaded.
If you selected native JavaHL connector, please check if binaries are available or install and select pure Java Subversion connector from the plug-in connectors update site.
If connectors already installed then you can change the selected one at: Window->Preferences->Team->SVN->SVN Client.

Hmmm...what's that?
I decided to check the preference page and found out that there is no connector installed at all. So where to get one...the error only tells me to download one, but not where to download it from...really nice error!

Ok, Google is your friend and so I found out that I have to add the following update site to get the connectors:

http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/

Just selected all available connectors and hit the install button...but if you think now the happy end comes in sight then you are wrong...the suffering continues...

Hmmm...I really think about doing a rm -Rf /opt/eclipse...what a mess.

Now it took really some time in Google to find the solution to this problem. There is again a update site missing...

http://download.eclipse.org/technology/subversive/0.7/update-site/

After adding it, you will not be able to see it. You have to select "Manage sites" and then select the added update site to be displayed. When finished, I just installed everything from that site and restarted eclipse.

So again I tried to use the connector update site and this time it worked finally.

Wow...somehow really a adventure...Eclipse documentation is somehow non-existing here.

I hope to save fellow developers time by posting this solution here.

ServiceMix and flexible endpoint configurations

2008-09-08T07:58:00.011+02:00

On my daily work with ServiceMix I was always facing the problem to have the xbean.xml not being flexible enough to let others customize it dynamically without rebuilding. Imagine you build a ready to use product for polling files and processing them in some way. Now you ship this product to the customer not knowing which path he will use for polling. This will probably end up in the demand for a change or some dirty hacking inside the data folder.

So how can I provide some more flexibility?

Spring does provide a nice mechanism to read dynamic properties from a file via an object called PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer. With this it is possible to load values from a property file.

So how can I do this?

Lets have a look at the xbean.xml:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<beans xmlns:f="http://servicemix.apache.org/file/1.0"
   xmlns:tut="http://www.servicemix.org/ns/jbi"
   xmlns:sm="http://servicemix.apache.org/config/1.0">
   <f:poller
      service="tut:filePoller"
      endpoint="pollEndpoint"
      file="${file.poll.folder}"
      targetService="#targetService"
      period="${file.poll.period}"
      recursive="${file.poll.recursive}" />

   <bean id="propertyConfigurer"  class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
      <property name="location">
         <value>file:${user.home}/esb/esb.properties</value>
      </property>
   </bean>

   <bean id="targetService" class="javax.xml.namespace.QName">
      <constructor-arg index="0" value="${file.poll.target.service.ns}"/>
      <constructor-arg index="1" value="${file.poll.target.service.name}"/>
   </bean>

</beans>

In the example code above we defined an object called PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer. This object loads the key-value pairs stored in the defined property file and makes the values available using the ${var-name} notation. (for example: ${file.poll.folder})

Conclusion

The really nice thing is that you can even use system variables like ${user.home} for getting the users home directory.

So you can have the property file where you want. The user home is just an example. Now if the customer wants to change the polled folder it's just a matter of changing a value inside the properties file and restarting the servicemix afterwards so the changes can take effect.

Just try it out and it will make your life a bit more easy.