MuleSoft
MuleSoft is a vendor that provides an integration platform to connect applications, data, and APIs across on-premises and cloud computing environments. To provide agility both on-premises and in the cloud, MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform integrates or connects SaaS applications and existing legacy applications through application programming interfaces (APIs). In addition, the platform integrates service-oriented architectures (SOA).
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform offers a various number of tools and services, such as:
API Designer. A web-based tool for creating APIs which also includes a console and a JavaScript scripting notebook. It also allows users to share their API design to receive feedback from other users.
API Manager. An API management tool that allows organizations to manage users, traffic, service-level agreements (SLAs), and API security. The API Manager also includes API Gateway.
Anypoint Studio. A graphical design environment for constructing, editing, and debugging integrations.
API Portal. A developer portal offering interactive documents, tutorials, and code snippets. It is also included in the API Portal such as MuleSoft’s Portal Designer, Developer Onramp, and Access Controller tools.
API Analytics. An analytics tool that allows users to track API metrics, such as performance and usage. The API Analytics service also includes visualization tools, such as API Dashboards and API Charts.
CloudHub. A multi-tenant integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that connects SaaS applications and on-premises applications. The iPaaS includes a hybrid deployment option, disaster recovery, and high availability.
What is Mule ESB
The key advantage of an ESB is that it allows different applications to communicate with each other by acting as a transit system for carrying data between applications within the user enterprise or across the Internet. Mule has powerful capabilities such as:
Service creation and hosting: Represent and host reusable services, using the ESB as a lightweight service container.
Service mediation: Shield services from message formats and protocols, separates the business logic from messaging, and enables the location-independent service calls.
Message routing: Route, filter, aggregate, and re-sequence messages based on content and rules.
Data transformation: Exchange the data across varying formats and transport protocols.
Why Mule?
Mule is lightweight but highly scalable, allowing the user to start small and connect more applications over a certain time period. The ESB manages all the interactions between applications and components transparently, irrespective of they exist in the same virtual machine or over the internet.
There are currently numerous commercial ESB implementations in the market. However, many of these provide limited functionality or they are built on top of an existing application server or messaging server, locking the user into that specific vendor. You are never locked in to a specific vendor when you use Mule.
Advantages of Mule
– Mule and the ESB model allows the significant component reuse. Unlike other frameworks, Mule allows the user to use their existing components without any changes. Components do not require any Mule-specific code to run in Mule, and there is no programmatic API required. The business logic is kept completely separate from the messaging logic.
– Messages can be in any format from SOAP to binary image files.
– The user can deploy Mule in different topologies, not just ESB. Because it is lightweight and embeddable, Mule can dramatically minimize time to market and increases productivity for projects to provide secure, scalable applications that are adaptive to change and can scale up or down as needed.
– Mule’s stage event-driven architecture (SEDA) makes it highly scalable. A major financial services company processes billions of transactions per day with Mule across thousands of Mule servers in a highly distributed environment.