Spring Boot, Docker and Websockets Integration with Apache Camel

Software today is being developed and released at a breakneck pace. No longer are organizations relying on a yearly, quarterly or monthly release cycle, but can now churn out multiple releases daily or even hourly. Two technologies that help facilitate this type of delivery model are Spring Boot and Docker. Spring Boot provides a lightweight microcontainer architecture for rapid development and deployment. It takes a Configuration over Convention approach to application development by leveraging resources on the java classpath to configure the application, which are then packaged into an executable jar. Since Spring Boot contains an embedded web container, an external container such as Tomcat is not required (Spring boot can be packaged into a traditional archive for deployment if desired). Docker on the other hand is one of the fastest growing technologies today and has changed the way many organizations package and deploy applications. It allows for an entire application environment to be assembled into images and deployed within containers. Docker Images are typically small in size and the creation of container is extremely fast compared to traditional virtualization technologies enabling rapid deployment and portability across machines.

With the recent release of version 2.15.0, the Apache Camel project now provides direct integration and support for both Spring Boot and Docker. The spring-boot component allows for the Camel context to be autoconfigured by components and configurations from a spring boot application. This includes the auto detection of Camel routes and injection of spring boot properties for use within Camel. The Camel Docker component communicates with the Docker daemon through the Docker rest API and exposes operations such as manipulating Docker images and containers within Camel to be notified when events within Docker occur. To illustrate the integration with these technologies along with several other components released in recent versions of Camel, a sample application has been developed.

The sample application is called spring-boot-docker-camel application can be found on GitHub

There are two primary goals of the application:

• Expose statistics from Docker such as listing images and containers
• Expose events originating within Docker

To facilitate user interaction with the application, a web page will be configured to allow users to view events from the Docker daemon in real time and also provide links to retrieve statistics from Docker. Instead of invoking the Docker rest API directly, Camel will be positioned to proxy the requests and expose a restful interface. Camel makes it easy to create restful endpoints by providing a DSL for creation and configuration. Since it is desired for events from Docker to be viewable on the web page, careful considerations should be made on the most efficient method to architect the solution. A polling mechanism to a Camel endpoint could be implemented by the web page, but this would be an expensive operation with regards to network traffic, as the majority of the requests would result in no consumable responses. On the other hand, if websockets were utilized, the amount of network traffic between the client and the server could be drastically reduced and be more efficient as the client would receive a response from the server immediately as an event occurs instead of waiting for the next polling interval. Spring Boot provides the capabilities to define and publish websockets endpoints that Camel can publish events to. Lets step through each aspect of the application to get a better understanding of the components involved and how they are able to integrate with each other.