There are many ways you can help make Camel a better piece of software - please dive in and help!

Try surf the documentation - if somethings confusing or not clear, let us know. Download the code & try it out and see what you think. Browse the source code. Got an itch to scratch, want to tune some operation or add some feature?

Want to do some hacking on Camel? Try surfing the our issue tracker for open issues or features that need to be implemented, take ownership of an issue and try fix it.

If you'd rather a more gentle introduction to working on the Camel project, how about you try look at the

test coverage report and help us get it even more green by supplying more test cases to get us closer to 100% coverage.

Getting in touch

There are various ways of communicating with the ActiveMQ community.

• join us on the Discussion Forums and take part in any conversations
• pop by on IRC and say hi
• add some comments to the wiki

Improving the documentation

Documentation is massively important to help users make the most of Apache Camel and its probably the area that needs the most help!

So if you are interested in helping the documentation effort; whether its just to fix a page here or there, correct a link or even write a tutorial or improve what documentation is already there please do dive in and help!

All of the documentation is stored on the wiki. See How does the website work or How do I edit the website for more details.

To be able to edit the wiki you need to mail the dev list asking for an account (to prevent spam we only offer access to the wiki by folks sending mail to the mailing list).

If you find a bug or problem

Please raise a new issue in our issue tracker

If you can create a JUnit test case then your issue is more likely to be resolved quicker.
e.g. take a look at some of the existing unit tests cases

Then we can add your issue to Subversion and then we'll know when its really fixed and we can ensure that the problem stays fixed in future releases.

Working on the code

Grab the Source and create a project in your IDE. e.g. if you are using Eclipse the following should do the trick...

svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/activemq/camel/trunk camel
cd camel
mvn eclipse:eclipse

Build the project.

mvn install

PS: You might need to build multiple times (if you get a build error) because sometimes maven fails to download all the files.

Then import the projects into your workspace.

Creating patches

We gladly accept patches if you can find ways to improve, tune or fix Camel in some way.

Most IDEs can create nice patches now very easily. e.g. in Eclipse just right click on a file/directory and select Team -> Create Patch. Then just save the patch as a file and then submit it. (You may have to click on Team -> Share... first to enable the Subversion options). Incidentally if you are an Eclipse user you should install the subclipse plugin.

If you're a command line person try the following to create the patch

diff -u Main.java.orig Main.java >> patchfile.txt

or

svn diff Main.java >> patchfile.txt

Submitting patches

The easiest way to submit a patch is to create a new JIRA issue, attach the patch, tick the Patch Attached button on the issue then fire off an email to the Discussion Forums.
When a ticket is create in JIRA it automatically sends an email to the developer forum.

Remember to create and attach the patch in two steps, as JIRA does not support granting ASF license to the patch in the create ticket wizard. So after creating the ticket, then attach the patch and remember to tick off the grant ASF license, otherwise we can not commit the patch. We prefer patches has unit tests as well and that these unit tests have proper assertions as well, so remember to replace your system.out or logging with an assertion instead!

Becoming a committer

Once you've got involved as above, we may well invite you to be a committer. See Becoming a committer for more details.

Using the issue tracker

Before you can raise an issue in the issue tracker you need to register with it. This is quick & painless.

If you want to have a go at fixing an issue you need to be in the list of activemq-developers on the issue tracker. To join the group, please mail the dev@activemq.codehaus.org mail list with the email address you used to register with the issue tracker and we'll add you to the group.

Why not dive in and try tackle some of our outstanding issues?

Apache ActiveMQ & Apache ServiceMix (25 issues)
T	Key	Summary	Assignee	Reporter	Pr	Status	Res	Created	Updated	Due
	CAMEL-824	create a Java / XML DSL overview describing the things the DSL can do...	Unassigned	James Strachan		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 14, 2008	Aug 14, 2008
	CAMEL-823	add HL7 DataFormat to the Java and XML DSLs	Unassigned	James Strachan		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 13, 2008	Aug 13, 2008
	CAMEL-817	create a camel-guice module to show how to dependency inject routes, beans, producers and consumers using Guice	James Strachan	James Strachan		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 12, 2008	Aug 13, 2008
	CAMEL-822	add JSON data format support using some JSON library like Google.JSON or Jettison	Unassigned	James Strachan		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 13, 2008	Aug 13, 2008
	CAMEL-821	RedeliveryPolicyType is missing the maximumRedeliveryDelay option	Unassigned	Claus Ibsen		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 13, 2008	Aug 13, 2008
	CAMEL-818	Should preserve the exchange type in the routing slip	Willem Jiang	Jonathan Anstey		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 13, 2008	Aug 13, 2008
	CAMEL-819	FileConsumeSingleDirectoryOnlyTest failure	Willem Jiang	Jonathan Anstey		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 13, 2008	Aug 13, 2008
	CAMEL-820	create demo showing how to register named components or endpoints via Guice IoC	Unassigned	James Strachan		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 13, 2008	Aug 13, 2008
	CAMEL-762	New component for smoks	Claus Ibsen	Claus Ibsen		In Progress	UNRESOLVED	Jul 27, 2008	Aug 13, 2008
	CAMEL-511	A method ala afterPropertiesSet() for programmatic validation that the endpoint is configured correctly	Unassigned	Claus Ibsen		Open	UNRESOLVED	May 13, 2008	Aug 12, 2008
	CAMEL-680	Document - Some annotations is injected by spring (Bean post processor)	Claus Ibsen	Claus Ibsen		Open	UNRESOLVED	Jul 06, 2008	Aug 12, 2008
	CAMEL-533	ExceptionHandling & JMSReplyTo in @MessageDriven	Unassigned	Aaron Mulder		Open	UNRESOLVED	May 20, 2008	Aug 12, 2008
	CAMEL-816	provide @Produce and @Consume annotations so its easy to use POJO programming for remoting without any Camel or middleware APIs being used	James Strachan	James Strachan		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 12, 2008	Aug 12, 2008
	CAMEL-814	Provide Aggregation Strategy/Collection implementation(s) that can be used to replace smx-eip SplitterAggregator & RecipientListAggregator	Unassigned	Ron Gavlin		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 12, 2008	Aug 12, 2008
	CAMEL-797	Add a part 4 to the tutorial (camel-example-reportincident) to show how to turn on the code to route messages using DSL language and/or spring xml configuration file	Unassigned	Charles Moulliard		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 08, 2008	Aug 12, 2008
	CAMEL-807	HttpProducer premature out message creation	Unassigned	Bill Skrypnyk		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 10, 2008	Aug 12, 2008
	CAMEL-813	Add exceptions setter in ErrorHandlerBuilderSupport.java	Unassigned	Kevin Urciolo		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 11, 2008	Aug 11, 2008
	CAMEL-621	File component - file rename pattern to support patterns such as date time etc.	Claus Ibsen	Claus Ibsen		Open	UNRESOLVED	Jun 19, 2008	Aug 09, 2008
	CAMEL-800	Table of current supported uris (chapter 3) displayed in the pdf of the manual is cut	Unassigned	Charles Moulliard		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 08, 2008	Aug 09, 2008
	CAMEL-770	allow a Spring Camel Context to be booted up just to extract the route defintions (camelContext.getRouteDefintions()) but not to actually process any routes	Unassigned	James Strachan		Open	UNRESOLVED	Jul 30, 2008	Aug 08, 2008
	CAMEL-601	Camel example as a web application	Claus Ibsen	Claus Ibsen		In Progress	UNRESOLVED	Jun 10, 2008	Aug 08, 2008
	CAMEL-794	Pipeline with thread() processor also redelivers following the default policy independently from the preset errorhadling	Unassigned	Bela Vizy		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 07, 2008	Aug 08, 2008
	CAMEL-791	check camel.osgi.export.pkg in all the components - some could be wrong	Unassigned	Claus Ibsen		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 07, 2008	Aug 07, 2008
	CAMEL-782	Tracer incorrectly treats messages with InputStream as body	Unassigned	Genadii Ganebnyi		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 05, 2008	Aug 05, 2008
	CAMEL-781	Add a new component to generate/print reports in PDF, HTML, Excel, ... format using reporting tool like JasperReport / Eclipse BIRT	Unassigned	Charles Moulliard		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 04, 2008	Aug 04, 2008

Becomming a committer

The first step is contributing to the project; if you want to take that a step forward and become a fellow committer on the project then see the Committer Guide