[CAMEL-15479] Clear up purpose of spring-boot and camel-spring-boot-starter

• Type: Wish
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Trivial
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 3.5.0
• Estimated Complexity: Unknown
• Assignee: Claus Ibsen
• Reporter: Franz J. Lanzendorfer
• Created: 28/Aug/20 14:27
• Updated: 29/Aug/20 13:49
• Resolved: 28/Aug/20 17:58

Description

Hey there,

I'm in the process of piecing together a Camel application using learnings from your Spring boot examples. I already have a demo application which simply leaves the CamelContext open via Thread.sleep, so my plan was to add the spring-boot dependencies and implement a proper Service. However, I'm currently unsure about the purpose of two dependencies: spring-boot vs. camel-spring-boot-starter.

The Camel documentation  regarding spring-boot only ever mentions including the camel-spring-boot-starter dependency, however all of the linked examples rely on a root project which uses the spring-boot project as its parent.

This leads me to the following questions, which I hope you can clarify for me:

1. What is the role of spring-boot vs. camel-spring-boot-starter?
2. If I want to set up a Maven project using these components would I use spring-boot as the parent and include camel-spring-boot-starter as a dependency? (as well as all the other camel dependencies I'd need to get the project running of course)
3. There often seem to be two versions of the "same" dependency: A default one and a "...-starter" one (e.g. camel-jackson and camel-jackson-starter). In a Camel-Spring-Boot application would I only ever use the '...-starter' variants, or do these serve a different purpose?

I hope my questions are clear and you can clarify a few things for me. Thank you again for your help!

 

Kind Regards