internal architectural principles of camel-jetty and camel-http4

[Geert Bozz <ge...@gmail.com>]

Hello all,

2nd attempt to send this (seems I have some problem with getting registered
on mailing list it seems and hence my post on the forum doesn't seem to get
through, my apology if you get this twice..

I'm working on the concept for a camel route and I have some high level
questions about the internal architecture of camel and especially
camel-jetty and camel-http4. I have a particular need and for this I want
to control the connection pool, enforce keep-alive connections, control
connection time-outs, ...

My route will take http soap requests (call A) and dispatch them to
multiple web services using soap once more (call B). I know how to write
this route, so that's not the question. My issue is that I want to exert
high control over the behaviour of the underlying jetty server for call A
and the http client for call B. The reason is that i need extremely fast
response time. I already know there are quite a few parameters you can set,
as explained in various articles on google, the docs and the forum, for
example

http://camel.apache.org/jetty.html and
http://camel.apache.org/http4.html and
http://camel.apache.org/how-to-use-camel-as-a-http-proxy-between-a-client-and-server.html
etc..

But I would like to understand the underlying architecture so that it can
be confirmed that above settings will be sufficient or that I need to start
digger deeper and how I best tackle this digging. Any pointers and advice
are appreciated. Below are a few points where I would like to have answers,
pointers to doc, corrections if I didn't get it, confirmation if I got it,
suggestions, advice, ... Both high and detailed reactions are appreciated:

- I want to enforce the usage of a connection pool and keep-alive
connections for call A and call B. Most simple solution is to use the
standard configuration options, explained in the links above. Because the
camel components just wrap jetty and http client, I really need to start
looking at respectively the docs of jetty and http client to understand the
possible parameters and their implications?

- If the documented configuration parameters are not sufficient for my
needs, I need to take the existing components and enrich them or even write
my own component, with (to give an extreme example) a reference to an hard
coded jetty or my own http client connection pool.

- Another idea, probably a very bad one and only valid for call B is to
forget about camel-http4: I could write my own processor to do the call B
and integrate it into the route. I could then try to write the processor
such that it would use a self-built connection pool?

- camel-cxf ensures that soap is being integrated into the built-in jetty
server automatically, so I don't need to worry about the fact that I'm
using a very specific kind of http request (SOAP). I really only need to
focus on the http communications going on under the hood, ie. jetty and
httpclient?

- Would I be able to influence the configuration of the built-in jetty
under the hood of camel (without going via camel-jetty) and would this
configuration be picked up at run time? I'm mentioning this because I'm
considering to deploy the whole application on servicemix, where I have
high control over the jetty server (if I use the right version of
servicemix :-)


Best regards, thank you for reading and big thank you if you also respond
:-)

geert