How do I add a component
You might first want to read Writing Components for a background in how to implement a new component.
Typically it means you write an implementation of the Component interface, usually deriving from DefaultComponent.
You can then register your component explicitly via
CamelContext context = new DefaultCamelContext(); context.addComponent("foo", new FooComponent(context));
However you can use the auto-discovery feature of Camel where by Camel will automatically add a Component when an endpoint URI is used. To do this you would create a file called
/META-INF/services/org/apache/camel/component/foo
with contents
class=org.acme.FooComponent
(you can add other property configurations in there too if you like)
Then if you refer to an endpoint as foo://somethingOrOther Camel will auto-discover your component and register it.
The FooComponent can then be auto-injected with resources using the Injector, such as to support Spring based auto-wiring, or to support @Resource (EJB3 style) injection or Guice style @Inject injection.
Working with Spring XML
You can configure a component via Spring using the following mechanism...
Which allows you to configure a component using some name (activemq in the above example), then you can refer to the component using activemq:destinationName.
If you want to add explicit Spring 2.x XML objects to your XML then you could use the xbean-spring which tries to automate most of the XML binding work for you; or you could look in camel-spring at CamelNamespaceHandler you'll see how we handle the Spring XML stuff (warning its kinda hairy code to look at . If you wanted <fooComponent> to be a standard part of the core Camel schema then you'd hack that file to add your component & conftribute a patch to the camel XSD. Otherwise you could write your own namespace & schema if you prefer.