The components are the main Camel extension point. Basically, a component is a factory of endpoints that you use in routes. If you take a look in the Component interface, you can see the following code:

public interface Component extends CamelContextAware {
   
   Endpoint createEndpoint(String uri) throws Exception;
   
   EndpointConfiguration createConfiguration(String uri) throws Exception;

   ComponentConfiguration createComponentConfiguration();

   boolean useRawUri();

}

You can see that a Component lives in the CamelContext (as it extends the CamelContextAware interface). This means that we instantiate a Component and add the instance in the CamelContext.

The Component is stored in the CamelContext using a unique identifier—the scheme. Later in the chapter, we will see that this schema is used to refer the Component in the route definition.