Month: June 2010

Demoed: Processing Data with the MuleSoft’s Eclipse Tool Suite

Posted on | by Aaron Landgraf | 2 Comments on Demoed: Processing Data with the MuleSoft’s Eclipse Tool Suite
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Last Tuesday night’s  demonstration of the MuleSoft’s Eclipse Tool Suite at the Vancouver Eclipse Demo Camp went well. I almost got Nerf-gunned for a (slight) overtime but the organizers’ mercifulness has allowed me reach the end of the demo with a running sample 🙂 For those who weren’t there, here is a summary of my presentation.

The challenge I’ve set to myself for this demonstration was the following: let’s figure out what’s the total length of roadworks currently happening in the city of Vancouver. Think of it as a reality check for your tax dollars at work!

Because Vancouver exposes plenty of its data on the web, this was really just a matter of pulling the right data source and transforming it to the desired output. Read on to find how I achieved this using Mule Data Integrator and Mule IDE…

The following image is a graphical representation of the roadworks in Vancouver, where the work in process is represented as orange lines on top of the affected streets:

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Tomcat 7.0.0 Beta is Out

Posted on | by jasonb | Leave a Comment on Tomcat 7.0.0 Beta is Out
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Many of you reading this have already seen the Apache Software Foundation’s press release about Tomcat 7.0.0 — it was voted beta quality on June 25th, and the Tomcat 7 web pages went live on the Tomcat project web site this morning. It looks wonderful! Congratulations to the Tomcat development team on a year and a half of Tomcat 7 development! This first beta release of the Tomcat 7 branch is a major step forward in that it implements the Java Servlet 3.0 API, which is not an incremental revision of the last version. It is a major feature revision that modernizes the Servlet API in a number of ways, and adds quite a few new features that webapp developers will use and enjoy.

What does it mean to say that version 7.0.0 beta is out? It seems like a strange thing to say, especially since Tomcat is open source — it was always “out”, since the ASF subversion repository is publicly open. So what’s different about the Tomcat 7 code today versus yesterday? The code for Tomcat 7.0.0 beta has been tagged for a while, and has even been available as downloadable binaries since the middle of this month. The main difference is: the Tomcat 7 web pages are now live, and the announcements about Tomcat 7 have been sent out. Tomcat 7 is still under active development, and will be for quite some time to come. The first stable release of Tomcat 7 is not available yet, but because the Tomcat 7 announcements point to the beta build, this new major branch of Tomcat will likely be tested more before a build of Tomcat 7 is voted stable.

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Introducing RESTx: A new, simpler way to integrate and publish data

Posted on | by juergen.brendel | Leave a Comment on Introducing RESTx: A new, simpler way to integrate and publish data
Reading Time: 24 minutes

We are happy to introduce RESTx, a new open source project from MuleSoft. We believe that RESTx is quite simply the quickest and easiest way to create RESTful resources and RESTful web services in your enterprise or in the cloud, to integrate data and to make your data ready to be integrated. We invite you to find out more about it, view case studies, download it, and try it out. We think you will be surprised by how quickly and easily you start being productive.

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Git and SVN: Happily Ever After?

Posted on | by Andrew Perepelytsya | 2 Comments on Git and SVN: Happily Ever After?
Reading Time: 8 minutes

Developers are interesting creatures – curiosity and the urge to explore are their second nature. The way it goes today (until quantum computers replace everything 😉 ) we still need to share our findings in some way, which happens to be a code repository. For years, Mule has been using Subversion (and CVS before that), and today there are new kids on the block fighting for our attention. While we aren’t yet ready to make a full switch (infrastructure tools need to mature, non-developers need some training, etc.), we’re happy to play with Git. Lucky us, they came up with a way to marry two worlds, which gives Subversion a ‘lease extension’.

This post describes a workflow which worked quite nicely for us. Who knows, maybe it helps your organization keep developers happy, while preserving sysadmin’s good night sleep too? Post your findings in the comments.

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Dynamic Requesting with Mule ESB

Posted on | by Aaron Landgraf | Leave a Comment on Dynamic Requesting with Mule ESB
Reading Time: 10 minutes

Imagine you want to build a synchronous HTTP service that fetches the data for its response over a JMS queue. Or from a directory whose path is dependent on the incoming request. If this sounds familiar then congratulations, you’ve been dealing with dynamic requesting before!

Depending on the transports you’re using and the level of flexibility you need, Mule ESB offers different configuration constructs and API calls that can help you to achieve your goal.

Because it is a pretty popular subject on the user’s forum, I though it would be relevant to present in this post a quick review of the different approaches for dynamic requesting in Mule.

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Control Tomcat from your iPhone

Posted on | by Sateesh Narahari | 4 Comments on Control Tomcat from your iPhone
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Recently I was hiking with couple of friends – one of them runs IT operations for a large consumer company. He was on call that weekend, so, sure enough, his phone rang: it was the customer service coordinator who was saying that her team was not able to access the application. My friend had to run back to the car to power up his laptop, connect to the VPN using his wireless card, check status of his Tomcat servers and jump on a bridge call. My other friend was busy tweeting and doing a foursquare check-in of his location (I think becoming mayor of a remote mountain in Colorado counts for something :)).

So, to help Tomcat admins who might not always be at their computer during on-call weekends, we just announced a TomcatStats for iPhone, the world’s first iPhone app for managing Apache Tomcat. Using TomcatStats, you can check if the Tomcat instances are running or not, if the applications on those servers are up or not and also get details about memory usage, connections etc.

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Upcoming presentations (June 2010)

Posted on | by Aaron Landgraf | 1 Comment on Upcoming presentations (June 2010)
Reading Time: 3 minutes

The last days of June will be busy as I will be talking at two events happening in Vancouver, BC, on the 29th and the 30th.

In the first presentation, I will demonstrate MuleSoft’s Eclipse Tool Suite at the local Eclipse DemoCamp, an event that always has an incredible line-up, thanks to the local presence of the Tasktop and SpringSource teams. Also, the University of British Columbia oftentimes presents there Eclipse plugins that explore the cutting edge of software development. My presentation will be focused on using both Mule IDE and Mule Data Integrator in order to build a data-intensive application for Mule ESB. If you’re interested, all the details are on the registration page.

My second presentation will cover the subject of using ready-made tools versus ad hoc coding in the field of enterprise application integration (EAI). I will give it at the Vancouver’s Software Developers Network as a follow-up talk to another presentation on EAI given in March by Shayan Manoochehri. I will present a few criteria that will help developers and architects decide between using ready-made EAI tools versus custom build solutions. More details can be found on the meet-up page.

If you can’t attend any of these presentation, do not despair: I will post the slides and related notes in this blog after these events.

The exceptional story of a Mule and a Toad

Posted on | by Aaron Landgraf | Leave a Comment on The exceptional story of a Mule and a Toad
Reading Time: 10 minutes

With a Mule and a Toad involved, one could expect that a third character would quickly need to be added to the cast: a princess to ride the former and kiss the latter. But then, what would be so exceptional about it? Because, actually, this story is about exceptions and their graceful handling. Moreover, the story takes place in the clouds, and princesses don’t fly so well…

So let’s come back to our main protagonists: you know Mule ESB already but you may not have heard about Hoptoad, an on-line service from thoughbot that takes care of aggregating exception messages and presenting them on a very well-crafted dashboard. Hoptoad is well known in the Ruby community, as it was initially built for Rails application, but any application that can post XML over HTTP, or use one of the numerous clients, can benefit from it.

As more and more applications get deployed in the cloud, using cloud-based services is starting to make a lot of sense for anything that’s outside the realm of a business’ core. Dealing with errors falls into that category. In this post, we will look at how your Mule applications could leverage Hoptoad for handling exceptions. Even if you don’t run Mule ESB on CloudCat and even if you’re already benefiting from the advanced error management features of Mule’s Management Console, you’ll still be interested to read on and learn about the construction of a custom exception handler for Mule.

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Beyond Integration, Part 1: Peak Time Handling

Posted on | by Aaron Landgraf | 12 Comments on Beyond Integration, Part 1: Peak Time Handling
Reading Time: 7 minutes

As an integration framework and broker, Mule ESB is the platform of choice for implementing and deploying enterprise integration solutions and related services. In this series of posts, I’m going to look at situations beyond the traditional integration scenarios where using Mule ESB has enabled the implementation of effective and elegant solutions.

In this first installment, I will talk about using Mule ESB as a frontal load-throttling middleware for applications that are not able to handle sudden peaks of requests, as illustrated in the following diagram.

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Webinar: Easily Build, Deploy, and Manage Ajax Applications on Tomcat

Posted on | by amber.taylor | 1 Comment on Webinar: Easily Build, Deploy, and Manage Ajax Applications on Tomcat
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Do you need to build Ajax applications quickly? Do you have Ajax applications you need to deploy and manage on multiple Apache Tomcat instances?

MuleSoft and WaveMaker have teamed up to bring you the simplest way to build and run enterprise class Ajax applications.

During this 45-minute webinar, you will learn how to:

  • Visually build a great-looking, standard Java web application in minutes
  • Deploy anywhere (local, data center, any cloud host)
  • Easily manage all of your Tomcat instances from one dashboard

This webinar will also feature a live demo showing how MuleSoft Tcat Server can help you apply configuration and deployment best practices with a few simple clicks.

Speakers:
Sateesh Narahari: Director of Product Management at MuleSoft
Derek Henninger: VP of Engineering at WaveMaker

Logistics:
Date: Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET

Click here to register now!