This note covers the goal for Camel 2.9 to reduce Spring dependency in camel-core and other Components where Spring is not really needed.
In camel-core we support Spring JMX annotations when we enlist MBeans in JMX. In fact Spring JMX must be on the classpath to be able to use JMX with Camel at all.
If Spring JARs is not on the classpath, Camel will automatic disable JMX. This puts a burden on end users of Camel who may not use Spring to include 8+ Spring JARs to have support for JMX.
Some Camel Components such as Velocity, Freemarker, XSLT uses Spring Resource API to load resources over the classpath etc. This does not work in OSGi blueprint, etc. Instead we should rely on the Pluggable Class Resolvers provided by Camel that works with OSGi, JBoss and other containers.
The Spring JMX annotation support code in camel-core should be moved to camel-spring. This allows people to keep using Spring JMX annotations.
We should add a SPI plugin in camel-core so camel-spring can hook in the Spring JMX annotation support it now provides. Likewise 3rd party can inject their custom integration.
We should provide a basic set of Camel JMX annotations in camel-core that the various Camel Components should use. This ensures we its stil easy to have Components enlist in JMX with custom attributes and operations. For example Apache ActiveMQ has a set of JMX annotations as well.
This also allows Camel end users to use these new Camel JMX annotations in their custom Camel components. Then they do not need to use Spring JMX annotations, and thus bring in maybe unneeded dependency on Spring JARs in their code.
The ResourceEndpoint from camel-spring should be moved to camel-core and rely on ClassResolver API from Camel to load resources from the classpath.
We would need to add support for the http scheme, and the file scheme. But those are easy. Then we can migrate the Freemarker, Velocity, XSLT components to not depend on Spring/camel-spring.
Since Spring JARs will no longer be mandatory on the classpath for JMX support, we can reduce the runtime JAR dependency for Camel end users. Most end users of Camel will need to support JMX, so essentially we force them to add Spring JARs. That means they only need slf4j logging and commons-management JARs.
Currently camel-core rely on commons-management for basic JMX support. We should consider porting this code into the camel-core codebase.
This reduces the mandatory JARs for camel-core to only the sfl4j logging API. This is as low as we can get.
The Mail and JMS component currently depend on Spring JARs. There is a work in progress patch for the Mail component to be able to run without Spring. The JMS component is however heavily dependent on Spring, as it uses spring-jms. We may in the future consider writing a new light weight JMS component that has less features, but can work without Spring. However this is not the goal for Camel 2.9. If we do our own jms abstraction which might be a good idea then we should put it in a apache commons project as it would also help other projects like cxf.