Ad 1, 2 and 3)

Camel itself has no web service stack. It integrates with Apache CXF or Spring WebServices. And they leverage a HTTP engine which handles the transport layer. For example Apache CXF supports using an embedded Jetty HTTP engine, or to use a servlet engine from a web server, or to use OSGi HTTP service etc. So its a matter of which runtime you use.

And those HTTP engines support handling concurrent requests. You can often configure/tweak those engines. For example to use a NIO asynchronous messaging, and/or configure thread pool sizes, and whatnot.

All this is taken care of. Often you can just use the default settings.

Yes Fuse IDE can help you with developing Camel applications. See for example this video of Fuse IDE in action: http://davsclaus.blogspot.com/2011/09/video-using-splitter-eip-and-aggregate.html

There are 2 other videos from links on this page http://fusesource.com/products/fuse-ide/

In terms of your Camel route, then its something alike

<bean id="myValidateBean" class="com.foo.MyValidateBean"/>
<bean id="lookupTargetBean" class="com.foo.MyLookupTargetBean"></bean>


<route>
   <from uri="cxf:bean:myWebService"></from>
   <to uri="log:input"></to>    
   <to uri="bean:myValidateBean?method=validate"></to>
   <recipientList>
     <method ref="lookupTargetBean" method="findTarget"></method>
   </recipientList>
  <to uri="log:output"></to>  
  <!-- when the route ends, the current message is send back as response -->
</route>

See details at

http://camel.apache.org/how-do-i-use-dynamic-uri-in-to.html

http://camel.apache.org/recipient-list.html

http://camel.apache.org/log

http://camel.apache.org/bean.html

http://camel.apache.org/bean-binding.html

The FTP component does not support concurrent consumers, as the underlying FTP framework is not thread safe.

We may be able to improve this by adding special support for this in Camel so we can have a poll of FTP worker threads, which can be assigned to download the files in parallel.

Instead you can simulate this by just creating X number of routes and link them using direct

from ftp1 -> to direct:process

from ftp2 -> to direct:process

from ftp3 -> to direct:process

The trick is you have concurrent ftp clients which will "race for the same files" so you need to use a read lock strategy that works on the FTP server.

You can also have 1 ftp route which download the FTP files to a local file system.

And the from the file system, you can have concurrent threads

from ftp -> to file backup

You can then have concurrent consumers using the threads EIP

http://camel.apache.org/async

And see this blog

http://davsclaus.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-road-to-camel-20-concurrency-with.html

I have created a ticket about the concurrent FTP consumers

http://fusesource.com/issues/browse/MR-524