Should I deploy Camel inside the ActiveMQ broker or in another application
Whether you deploy the Enterprise Integration Patterns inside the ActiveMQ Broker or in a separate application depends on your requirements.
Advantages of deploying EIP inside the broker
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It is a single JVM so less moving parts and you’re less likely to forget to deploy something.
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If you are doing things like polling resources such as files, databases and bridging them to queues or topics then its usually more efficient to host in the broker; as there’s less contention and there’s no network communication between the EIP rules and the message broker as its all in the same JVM (so you can use the VM Transport to avoid network overhead.
Advantages of deploying EIP inside a separate application
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It is easier to deploy loads of JVMs containing the EIP routing rules to get better load balancing.
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You can easily change your routing rules then stop/restart applications without having to restart your broker. Having said that since ActiveMQ supports it’s not such a big deal to bounce the Broker now and again to refresh routing rules. Note that at some point Camel will support auto-reload of routing rules on the fly without having to stop and reload the JVM so one day this won’t be such a big benefit.