Mule Part I: Introduction

Mule is widely used open source framework for Enterprise Integration. In this post, I will  try to cover basics of Mule and why you should be using Mule since there is very less documentation available for the mule.

What is Enterprise Integration?

In an organization, there will be multiple applications or products or processes to complete the end to end business flow or transaction. Needless to say that, these applications might be owned by different business groups or teams and so the underlying architecture or communication protocol will defer as well. 

So to serve the business, there is always the need to allow these applications or processes to communicate to each other regardless of the underlying architecture or protocol or communication style. For ex, to settle the trade, Frond office will receive the trade instruction, Middle office will process the trade and back office will settle the trade with market feed. Now let's assume, front office application which will receive the trade is designed using .Net framework and Middle office application which processes the trade is designed in Java. In order to communicate either of this application need to change (Java or .Net) which would be a disaster and there comes the power of Enterprise Integration Software or tools !! 

In our case, front office can send trade message or instruction to middle office process through web service and middle office can process the same through Mule or any other Integration tool like apache camel or spring integration etc without changing underlying architecture and same way send it to downstream system or back office. So two systems can work in isolation without interfering to what other system offers....

Now let's understand how we can achieve this through Mule ESB.

What Is Mule?

Mule is a transport-agnostic, Java-based messaging framework that allows disparate applications to connect without having to call each other directly. Mule supports multiple threading/messaging models, input and output to various transports (email, files, databases, etc.), and web services through protocols such as SOAP (see Figure 1).

With Mule, you can...

• integrate applications or systems on premise or in the cloud
• use out-of-the-box connectors to create SaaS integration applications
• build and expose APIs
• consume APIs
• create Web services which orchestrate calls to other services
• create interfaces to expose applications for mobile consumption
• integrate B2B with solutions that are secure, efficient, and quick to build and deploy
• shift applications onto the cloud
• connect B2B e-commerce activities

Leveraging the three layers of its architecture: application, integration, and transport, Mule implements an enterprise service bus (ESB) and provides a platform for a service oriented architecture (SOA). The layered approach promotes reusability (see Figure 2).

So stay tuned for more of Mule..............