How does Camel compare to Mule?
This FAQ entry was written when Mule 1.x and 2.x existed. It doesn’t cater for how Mule may go in Mule 3.x.
I guess from 30,000 feet they’re kinda similar beasts; they’re both kinds of routing/mediation engines. The main differences are as follows:
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Camel uses a Java Domain Specific Language in addition to Spring XML for configuring the routing rules and providing Enterprise Integration Patterns
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Camel’s API is smaller & cleaner (IMHO) and is closely aligned with the APIs of JBI, CXF and JMS; based around message exchanges (with in and optional out messages) which more closely maps to REST, WS, WSDL & JBI than the UMO model Mule is based on
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Camel allows the underlying transport details to be easily exposed (e.g. the
JmsExchange
,JbiExchange
,HttpExchange
objects expose all the underlying transport information & behaviour if its required). See How does the Camel API compare to -
Camel supports an implicit Type Converter in the core API to make it simpler to connect components together requiring different types of payload & headers
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Camel uses the Apache 2 License rather than Mule’s more restrictive commercial license