Hi George,
we are glad to give you a few more answers to your questions which are hopefully exactly what you and your project are looking for:
1) with the Talend ESB 4.0 which is available now under the Apache License you can start to use Camel with support from Talend. At this time it is the Camel-Runtime (ncl. a prepared OSGi Container in case you are interested to run the routes in OSGi) but there is no specific tooling to Camel so far within the Talend ESB 4.0 SE. That said, we are also close to provide you the related tooling for Camel as part of our next Release of Talend ESB SE in June. So the tooling is just a few weeks away and for people who knows how to work with TOS it's quite easy to also use the Route Builder Tooling as it is quite similar to what we do in TOS for Data Integration job#s and data servers (did you recognized the tESBProvider/tESb Consumer compoents already?) .
We also will strongly continue to make the use of Camel and CXF as easy as possible for people and you can expect that the current stuff is only the starting point and we participate also in the Apche Camel and CXF projects to not fork things but to really support the core Apache Projects and provide the professional tooling and support around them.
So the current TOS 4.2 provides you not exactly what you are looking for but the Camle Tooling is soon to come.
2) Additionally you mentioned Smooks. Talend also contributes to Smooks and we have a new component in TOS / TIS 4.2. which leverages the EDIFACT support from Smooks and makes it even easier to use and to combine with the other stuff TOS / TIS provides. In TOS/TIS you find the tEDIFACTtoXML component and in TIS there is also a Wizard which gives you immediate access to the UN/EDIFACT Standards to just select from. In case you look for a plain smooks component you might try out this one (se link at the end ) and let us know if this this is something you are interested in to use for your project.
http://soperadi-smooks.googlecode.com/files/SmooksComponents.pdf (ignore the EDI stuff as it is much better now in tEEDIFACTtoXML but the tSmooks component might help you to do just transformations e.g. using the Freemaker templates ) So far the tSmooks component is more a technical proof of concept and not really tested with (TOS4.2 so far) but if we find enough people with interest it clearly something we could work on to get it in the product or make it available via talendforge.
So please stay tuned and let us know what you need and if we are on the right track with what we did so far for your project.
Thanks
Dietmar
