How should an ESB be packaged/deployed?

Question

I am trying to wrap my head around Apache Camel, which appears to be a lightweight ESB. If I understand Camel/ESBs correctly, then you can think of a Camel Route as a graph of n

Answer 1

You are considering .ear embedding, I see.

I would recommend you to think twice about embedding Camel to tight inside a full featured Java EE server. It is certainly doable, but you will get some work to connect them (with commonJ, WorkManagers, JNDI references etc). Specifically, letting Camel handle the threading is a large plus.

Embedding Camel inside a spring web-app (.WAR) i my personal favourite for deployment in Jetty or Tomcat. Then you get access to a decent servlet container, a runtime that can do some things, etc.

Actually, I've used the standard download of ActiveMQ in some production environments with the embedded Camel, more for adapter purposes and not so much ESB, but still, it might be a valid choice if ActiveMQ is the messaging backbone of your ESB.