Apache Camel: do Processors and Beans serve the same purpose?

Question

It seems like both serve the same purpose. Is there any difference that makes one useful in certain situations and not the other ?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6061813/apache-camel-do-processors-and-beans-serve-the-same-purpose

Answer 1

In practice, they are very similar, but a Processor is more limited than a Bean. I generally use a Processor for simple use cases that just interact with the Exchange. Also, inline processors are a great way to interact without having to create a separate class.

Beans provide more flexibility and also support a true POJO approach. This allows you to more easily integrate with existing APIs (just need to convert the inputs/outputs to match, etc).

Beans also provide great features/flexibility with regards to Camel routing/EIP integration, including...

• rich set of bindings that allow you to quickly bind data from the Exchange to attributes of a bean method, etc.

• POJO consuming/producing allow you to interact with endpoints in a reusable manner

• used as expressions/predicates (for POJO EIP implementation...filters, etc)