Apache Camel turned 5 years old, on the 2nd of July 2012. Happy Birthday.

On that day 5 years ago Apache Camel 1.0 was released, just about 3.5 months after James Strachan did the very first commit of what became the Apache Camel codebase.

Every since the first release Camel has gone from strength to strength, with many new releases since

Just to name a few noteworthy highlights in the last five years:

The Camel community is a very active community with a lot of collaboration around the Apache Camel project. Most noticeable is the fact the community builds many custom Camel Components and donate these to the project. That is why the project have grown from 18 to more than 120 components in these five years. As we write this there is new components on the way for Redis, CMIS, and more to come in the next 2.11 release.

The word of the Apache Camel project is also spread with the fantastic help of the community. We have people write articles for both print and online magazines, as well the increasing number of blog posts about Apache Camel. We also see Apache Camel being presented at an increasing number of Java conferences, and not only by people from the Camel team but also people from the community.

There is also a growing number of people and posts on the various Camel forums such as the mailing list. And as well on 3rd party sites such as Stackoverflow, as shown by the next couple of graphs:

All together 5 fantastic first years. Cheers for another great years to come ahead.