We have a Camel based application, with Spring DSL and deployed as a war in Tomcat 7. We have separate deployment team, which configures production parameters in a property file and deploys the application to production, basically we follow J2ee kind of development/deployment model with different roles and responsibilities.
By moving to Talend, we are trying to get benefit of visual and rapid development with less code. I have been through various webinars/tutorials, but I am struggling with development/deployment model Talend follows, i.e., different roles and responsibilities, I have following specific questions regarding this -
1) What would it mean to migrate above Camel application to Talend, in terms of, current development->deployment process we follow?
2) Would Tomcat need to be replaced by Talend ESB runtime?
3) Would deployers also need to use TOS?
Any help on this will highly appreciated and will get us step closer to adapt Talend.
Hello
maybe someone from Talend could answer much better, as the features depend on the edition you want to use. With the TOS Open Source edition you will have to do lot of things manually or write few scripts, Commercial edition has lot of features what can help you in the deployment cycle (mainly shared repository support).
Another question to answer is, if you need to stick to Tomcat. Talend ESB mediation routes are meant to run in the Talend ESB (runtime) and I see shift to diminish WAR export (well, I believe it is getting difficult extending features and still supporting more target environments).
1) What would it mean to migrate above Camel application to Talend, in terms of, current development->deployment process we follow?
- Many WAR files (if correctly built) will run on Talend ESB too (when war feature is enabled), but I personally don't like it. TESB is not indended to be a front end web server, even can serve that way.
- If you build OSGi bundles (native for Karaf infrastructure) instead of war files, we suggest to organize your code/routes into bundles and features and use shared maven infrastructure (e.g. Nexus server) to manage versioning, deployment, etc. Talend Commercial edition has direct supoport to deploy developed artefacts (services, jobs, routes) into a maven repository.
The TOS cannot parse your existing DSL files, so you will have to rewrite / re-model them (or for start only copy/paste your DSL into the DSL component). You have to pay more attention to the configuration (registered beans, references, ..). In open source TOS it is still a quite cumbersom, Commercial edition allows you much better handling of your existing String/blueprint DSL files.
OSGi architecture of the runtime enables much better modularity in sense of dependency and versioning management. And Apache Karaf (core of the ESB runtime) supports deployment of features - sets of bundles and dependencies.
2) Would Tomcat need to be replaced by Talend ESB runtime?
You should do your best to distinguish layers, e.g. we use Tomcat for UI, user authentication, .. and Talend ESB for backend integration. We strongly suggest to do so. OSGi architecture offers much better dependency handling and hot-deployment options.
3) Would deployers also need to use TOS?
Depends what your deployers do. I think the answer is no. TOS is mean to do development and eventually deploy your packages into a shared (maven) repository. Deployers can use already built and stored artefacts.
A hope it helped a little
Have fun
Gabriel
