Figure 1.1 gives an overview of the architecture for a router deployed in standalone mode.

Figure 1.1. Standalone Router

The Camel context represents the router service itself. In contrast to most container deployment modes (where the Camel context instance is normally hidden), the standalone deployment requires you to explicitly create and initialize the Camel context in your application code. As part of the initialization procedure, you explicitly create components and route builders and add them to the Camel context.

Components represent connections to particular kinds of destination—for example, a file system, a Web service, a JMS broker, a CORBA service, and so on. In order to read and write messages to and from various destinations, you need to configure and register components, by adding them to the Camel context.

The RouteBuilder classes represent the core of your router application, because they define the routing rules. In a standalone deployment, you are responsible for managing the lifecycle of RouteBuilder objects. In particular, you must create instances of the route builder objects and register them, by adding them to the Camel context.