Our recent search for an Enterprise Integration framework (EIP) lead us to Apache Camel.

We liked it, since it had all the necessary ingredients. However, we set out to find more information about camel’s popularity before entrusting it with our critical applications. Specifically, we wanted to see if camel is popular enough to sustain for long term. This analysis is important, because almost 90% of opensource projects are inactive or with very low activity as reported by Ohloh.

So we compared Camel to Spring Integration (SI) and Mule ESB, two softwares with similar features. Also to be noted here is that Mule is a full fledged ESB whereas SI and Camel are not.

Moving on to the number, here is the trend in absolute job numbers from indeed,

Looks like all the 3 have trended down for good part of 2013. While Mule ESB continues its slide, Spring Integration and Camel seems to be climbing back. Baring a few exceptions, all the 3 have started gaining popularity from 2011.

Now, Lets take a look at the growth,



While Camel is having a steady growth, SI is having the highest growth numbers.

Lets also check how these compare to Google trends,

Even here, Spring Integration shows slight lead over Camel, while Mule ESB is not growing as much.

Now moving on to who uses them. Many people are interested in this information and this always makes a nice slide in the sales presentations. Perhaps, it gives comfort to know that familiar names are using them in production. Also if many companies/industries have invested in the technology, it would indicate larger trained workforce. Nice to have for future hiring, should a need arise. While we could get the list of companies currently hiring, it doesn’t mean that the companies are actually using them. But this is the closest information we could get regarding the real world usage.

So here is the list we collected,

Camel Spring Integration Mule ESB Walmart Bank Of America UPS Westlake Financial Sabre Cigna Experis AT&T CGI Century Link Liberty Mutual Manhattan Associates GEICO JP Morgan Chase Fidelity Well Point Akmai General Dynamics Intuit GEICO JP Morgan Chase Verizon United Health Deloitte Navisite

In summary, Spring Integration seems to have the most momentum. And Camel also seems to be holding onto its growth. At a minimum, Mule seems to be not growing as much. And all the 3 have variety of companies showing interest. This information was good enough for us as we also had RedHat paid support.

This analysis could also be expanded to track the release history, forum activities, bug fixes, etc. That would be for another post.