ServiceMix First Impressions

I spent a little time working with ServiceMix this weekend. Overall, I have good things to say about it. I wanted to quickly hack together a poller to read an Atom feed and convert it to RSS, filtering for specific keywords in the process. I used the RssComponent to poll the Atom feed and send any new entries to an XslComponet, which applied an XSL stylesheet to convert it to RSS, filter entries out by title, and republish it as a full RSS feed using the FileComponent.

Things I would have James fix in future releases:

1. Add better logging to the components – I had to rebuild a few components to get some better debugging. I’d love to see some better debugging lines in the components to assist in tracking events and component behavior. The good part is that the build environment is easy to use (Maven), and that he has a nice separation of concerns and easy-to-read build environment.
2. Some of the docs on the website are referencing the new package scheme since he was brought under Apache (org.apache.servicemix), while the latest release still uses the old package naming (org.servicemix). James may want to consider not rolling out the new docs under he releases the next version with the new package names
3. More detailed component documentation – the docs are pretty good, but I did have to go to the source to track behavior down, as well as dig into the third party docs for things like Rome (RSS/Atom support) to determine the constants for RSS vs. Atom. Going to the source is fine for me, as a full-time Java developer, but I believe his target audience for ServiceMix will be integrators that will not want to dig into the source.

Overall, I would recommend ServiceMix, and I plan to spend more time with it in the future on this project and other ideas that I have. Thanks James for the hard work!

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