“Implementing Messaging Patterns Using Web Services With Mule”: Webinar archive and sample code.

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For those of you that wish the view this webinar again, or for those of you that missed it, the archive of this webinar is now available online here.

Also the sample code shown in the Webinar is now available here. Any questions can be sent to our User List

How to Define Services

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Defining what constitutes a service when building service-orientated applications seems to be a common problem for developers and architects who are new to building services. The main issue seems to be the scope, i.e. what is the granularity of the service. This is actually quite difficult since the granularity of a service can vary depending on the application. The trick with any fuzzy problem is to break it into smaller pieces. There is a very simple service taxonomy defined in Thomas Erls SOA in Principals of Service Design book which I believe makes the approach to defining services much easier.

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Hungry for Some Mule Reading?

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It’s great times for the Mule Community with more and more Mule texts coming out. Today we’d like to highlight the just-released DZone Mule Refcard (free registration). It’s a great and concise PDF reference on Mule, and it’s coming from Jos Dirksen himself, the co-author of Open-Source ESBs in Action.

Don’t miss out on the Mule 2: A Developer’s Guide by our long-time friends Peter Delia and Antoine Borg. Special thanks to Antoine for being such an active Mule evangelist and community member.

And as a teaser, I’m currently reviewing the final manuscript of Mule in Action by David Dossot and John D’Emic. Even a quick look reveals so much cool action there that any self-respecting Mule developer should be eagerly awaiting this book to join the Mule shelf.

What else can I say? Keep ’em coming! 🙂

Webinar: Implementing Messaging Patterns Using Web Services With Mule

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Most people reading this blog are Mule users and are familiar with message-based architectures and enterprise integration patterns, and most people have heard of or used web services at some point, but how many of you have successfully used Mule and web services together without compromising your architecture?

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Config file wizard

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Creating new Mule configurations can be a tedious task, because you have to know which modules and transports to use and properly declare all namespaces on the root <mule> element of your configuration file.

The latest Mule IDE snapshot adds a wizard for creating a new Mule configuration. Simply choose File > New > Other, and then select Mule Configuration from the Mule category. This will bring up the following wizard:

Simply select the modules and transports you want in your new configuration and click Finish. Mule IDE will generate a configuration file with proper namespace declarations. If a transport or module declares more than one namespace (e.g., the Email transport declares SMTP/S, POP3/S, and IMAP/S) all namespaces will be included in the new configuration.

Did SOA Just Die?

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There is an interesting post by Anne Thomas Maines from Burton Group exclaiming that SOA has gone the way of the Dodo:

Once thought to be the savior of IT, SOA instead turned into a great failed experiment—at least for most organizations. SOA was supposed to reduce costs and increase agility on a massive scale. Except in rare situations, SOA has failed to deliver its promised benefits. After investing millions, IT systems are no better than before. In many organizations, things are worse: costs are higher, projects take longer, and systems are more fragile than ever.

Of course the part we all want dead is the vague, hand-wavy, SOA hype. Those that bought into proprietary-SOA and its heavy-handed, “big bang” approach lost out and everyone else got sick of fuzzy SOA promises. But behind any hype in the enterprise space you can find good ideas. The fact is that the ideas behind SOA are as important to us (the distributed masses) as Object Orientation was to the development of complex applications. The difference is that OO required that a single developer to think differently, SOA requires a whole organization of people to think differently-

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