History of Camel Quarkus from the very beginning to 1.0.0

I have originally written this for the upcoming Camel Quarkus 1.0.0 announcement, but then decided to remove it from there based on some review comments. I still think the history deserves to be written somewhere, so I am pasting it here.

When and how Camel Quarkus was born?

Luca and Guillaume started porting Camel to Quarkus very early while Quarkus was still in the stealth mode at Red Hat. The work started around November 2018 and was merged to Quarkus master on Feb. 28, 2019 - shortly before Quarkus was publicly announced on March 7, 2019. At that time, Quarkus supported just a handful of Camel components.

Moving to ASF

The next important milestone was donating the Camel specific bits from the main Quarkus source tree to Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This happened around July 2019 and the current GitHub home of the project is the result. Camel Quarkus thus became a subproject of Apache Camel, along with Camel K, Camel Spring Boot, Camel Karaf and Camel Kafka Connector.

The life under ASF

Under the new home, the project attracted a fair amount of new contributors (currently 36 in total) which in turn brought a lot of contributions.

Within those ~13 month from migrating to the ASF repo to 1.0.0 we released 7 milestones and 3 candidate releases. That gives a rough average cadence of one release every ~5 weeks.

Stay tuned for Camel Quarkus 1.0.0!