Hi I am writing this mail with a "community hat" as well being a very concerned Camel team member.
The API in camel-core had a fair number of changes recently, which is a strong concern from a community point of view. Basically the community views Camel 2.x as an mature and well established project, but also an "old and stable" product because of Camel 2.x being 2+ years old. In summary the community wants in Camel 2.x - NO CHANGES IN API The community do not care if class is named X or placed in Y etc. The community care about that the class is kept named X and kept placed in Y. That said, API changes is needed from time to time, and this is why you accumulate API change ideas in roadmap wiki pages, TODO in the source code etc. And possible some JIRA tickets. Then when a new major version is in the works such as Camel 3.0, then those API changes can be executed. In fact designing an API is a bigger challenge than at first thought. Today you feel class X should be named and placed in Y package. To days later it should be named X2 and placed in Z package instead. To give amble time for API changes to settled down, and see how it "works out" then milestone releases of the 3.0 is being released. This gives the community and early adopters a changes to help out and give feedback. This is common practice and how other projects do. The Apache Camel 2.x project is a very successful project and its usage have reached beyond what you may see as a typical situation. We have many other open source projects which integrate directly with Camel in their products. We have other open source projects and commercial products that is based on top of Camel, or using Camel heavily internally. Their most likely use the API in ways the typical end user does not. So bottom line the exposed API is in use out there. The Camel team ove to the community to keep the API stable regardless if a class could be renamed to X to have a bit better name etc. Likewise it does not give confort in the community if the API is kept changing and their use of the API keeps being @deprecated. So when they compile or upgrade to a new version, they get scared because of the sheer number of @deprecate warnings. It is a costly $$$ for any organization to change source code, as often rigors testing and procedures kicks in, when the source code must be changed. Likewise the Apache Camel subversion repository on trunk, is not a personal * experiment* branch where the Camel committers should "play" and move around with classes and whatnot. It would be better to setup a branch or a personal project on github etc to work on the expriment (for example as I did with the simple language improvements project). >From community point of view. Keep the API stable in our "old" and beloved Camel 2.x product. >From community point of view. Start a discussion about Camel 3.0, as we think the Camel 2.x product is "old and stable". But the community would like a brand new Camel 3.0 in early 2012. -- Claus Ibsen ----------------- FuseSource Email: cib...@fusesource.com Web: http://fusesource.com Twitter: davsclaus, fusenews Blog: http://davsclaus.blogspot.com/ Author of Camel in Action: http://www.manning.com/ibsen/
