Apache Camel - Something Fresh

I have been working with Apache Camel for a good 8-9 months now, and have been committing as much as I can more recently. It is amazing as it feels like a breath of fresh air from the complexities of jbi in the servicemix arena.

Of course, many who work on and with servicemix also work on and work with camel and that is why I find camel refreshing. Simply that it is all the goodness of servicemix without the layer of jbi. Not to knock jbi of course, but it was very complex working with myriads of SU and SA Zip files that sometimes did nothing more than bloat your .m2 repository. Ahh those were the days. (edit: I will add that I am looking forward to the new ServiceMix 4.0 kernel as it , from what I can tell, is making large task of simplifying the architecture).

So what am I using Camel for ? Recently a client has had some iteresting gaps in a project that neither the global provided ETL PowerCenter informatica or locally developed scripts were sufficing or could suffice the gap.

Primarily we have been camel riding inside AMQ so we get good cluster support (potential) but it's the out of box nature that I enjoy (used to it from the servicemix days).

So .. good work Camel devs, keep it up, and hopefully I can keep it up.

Stick with the masses ( Eclipse 3.4.1 XPCOM error -2147467262 )

There is a lot to be said about sticking with the masses, going with the crowd so to speak. Especially when you are riding the crowd (crowd) surfing for a different purpose .. huh ?

Let me explain ..

I have been an active user of Linux for the best part of 14 years. In that time, I have sat on the bleeding edge of changes and sometimes suffered. But, also I had time to kill, the fix and fix and patch time was kind of fun.

These days I have a lot less time that I allocate to that discretionary IT time budget, as I have a 2 girls and my beautiful wife with whom I enjoy spending time.

I still mass large amounts of work into my time, but when something goes wrong, ancillary to my task, (or, better put - my tools fail), then i get cranky.

Just on Friday I was prepping to make some changes to camel-file/ftp, adding support for commons-vfs and my eclipse failed to load.

It worked on the Thu, but Fri, nothing. My error said look at workspace/.metadata/.log

In there I find an obscure message...

!ENTRY org.eclipse.ui 4 0 2009-01-12 14:23:58.273
!MESSAGE Unhandled event loop exception
!STACK 0
org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Failed to execute runnable (org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467262)

As it turned out, this was caused by an incompatibility with my eclipse and (possible Firefox or something in a mozilla stack).

What was my fix ? Well it turns out, the workspace info page at the first startup of eclipse uses a browser (no worries). But it had fundametal issues launching my system default browser. To get past the bug .. you need to unpack a jar

(/opt/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.ui.intro_3.2.201.v20080702_34x.jar)

and edit the plugin.xml, commenting out all extension elements, repack it and restart eclipse with a -clean.

See here for details (this link was the 5th attempt at me getting around the problem).

So why stick with the masses ? Well, I can only guess, but I suspect my running of Ubuntu amd64 is the cause of this eclipse issue biting me. Or, put it mildly, the error has not been tested much on this platform and I got stung, I could be wrong, but I can only guess that, surely others have seen the problem, I am not the only one running eclipse on Linux.

Where it failed for me is that Ubuntu automatically updated (something) and then my eclipse broke. I haven't got the time to work out what updated in the last week due to the auto update manager .. ? question: is there such a place to see the install log.. dpkg must know).

Anyways, my problem is gone and I am back to my usual eclipse-ing self. (minus the intro page, but i have never used that anyway).