This month we celebrate the 4 year birthday of the Apache Camel project. Camel was conceived as a sub project from Apache ActiveMQ project.

In fact the first commit of the project to Apache was done by one of its founders, James Strachan, on March 19th 2007.

The first public announcement of the project as posted on a blog by James on May 15th 2007, in his blog titled
Enterprise Integration Patterns in Java.

Apache Camel 1.0 was released on the 2th of July 2007 according to the timestamp in the central Maven repository.
What strikes me as really impressive with the 1.0 release was the envision of its founders to emphasize on making
integration easier using EIPs and DSLs. The first release of Camel had its powerful Java DSL and Spring XML from
the very beginning.

Over the course of time the Camel team have released many Camel releases.
A total of 11 release of the Camel 1.x series.
And so far 10 releases (and 3 milestones) of the Camel 2.x series.

The project has since grown tremendously and today is one of the most popular integration frameworks out there.

In January 2009 the project became a top level project at Apache.

It is believed that one of the first public presentation of Apache Camel at a major conference took place in 2008
where Bruce Snyder presented ActiveMQ and Camel at several conferences.

Since then Camel have appeared in many public presentation, both at major conferences, JUGs and other events.
We do have a number of links to those presentations at the Articles page.

The popularity of the Camel project keep rising and at the end of last year, the Camel in Action book went into print.
Having a book published by the well respected Manning publication is a testimony of the popularity of the project.

Today the Camel team is busy finalizing on the last bits for the upcoming Apache Camel 2.8.0 release.

Happy birthday Camel.

On behalf of the Camel team
Claus Ibsen