All Camel projects will drop support for Java 8 by end of 2021. The next LTS release Camel 3.14, scheduled for December 2021, will be the last release to support Java 8. In light of this we will extend the support period of Camel 3.14 from 1 year to 2 years. This means Camel 3.14 will reach its end of life (EOL) at end of December 2023.
The Apache Camel project is moving to release schedule with Long Term Support (LTS) and non-LTS releases. The plan is to have 2 yearly LTS releases and then non-LTS releases in between. This allows the Camel project to innovate and move much faster in non-LTS releases. And as well to offer production stable branches (LTS) where end users can stay on for a longer period of time and get CVEs and important/critical bug fixes only.
It’s the time of the year where we take a look back at 2019, and compile a brief summary of the Apache Camel project. The big news of 2019 was the much anticipated release of Apache Camel 3. Family of projects It was also in 2019 that the Camel project became a family of projects by introducing: Camel K Camel Quarkus Making Apache Camel a trilogy.
The Apache Camel community introduces a new subproject in the ecosystem: Camel-Kafka-Connector. This project born as a PoC exploring the possibility of leveraging the Apache Camel components as Kafka source and sink connectors. The main idea behind the project is reusing the Camel Components’ flexibility in a simple way, through a configuration file mixing Kafka Connect configuration and Camel route definitions and options. What is Kafka Connect? It is an Apache Kafka’s framework that defines a standardized way to stream data in and out a kafka broker.
The Camel team is busy working on the last set of work for Apache Camel 3. Today the 2nd release candidate was built and published on a staging repository for early adopters to give it a try. As I am busy myself then I just wanted to write a short blog post to keep the community posted that Apache Camel 3 is on the way, and that we expect it to be released by end of this year (sometime in November or December).