Configuring Message Processors on Endpoints

Reading Time: 6 minutes

One of the big architectural changes in Mule 3 is that everything has become a Message Processor1. What is a message processor? It’s a very simple interface for anything which takes a Mule message2 and does something with it (transforms it, filters it, splits it, etc.). One of the big advantages to everything implementing this simple interface is that message processors can be chained together in any order, there can be any number of them, and they can easily be swapped around. This sort of thing was not at all possible prior to Mule 3.

In the case of endpoints, the following message processors are allowed:

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Pattern-Based Configuration: Hello Web Service Proxy!

Reading Time: 7 minutes

After the introduction of Simple Service, the configuration patterns series continues!

The second pattern we would like to introduce is Web Service Proxy. Proxying web services is a very common practice used for different reasons like security or auditing. This pattern allows a short and easy configuration of such a proxy.

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Pattern-Based Configuration: Hello Simple Service!

Reading Time: 7 minutes

As announced before, Mule 3 will offer pattern-based configuration artifacts that will allow you to perform common configuration tasks with the least amount of XML. This first post opens the series where each of these patterns will be introduced.

The first configuration pattern we’d like to present is called: Simple Service. Its goal is as simple as its name suggests: provide a simple way to expose request-response services. In other terms, it is used to expose some business logic in a synchronous manner over the transport of your choice.

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Mule 3 Architecture, Part 1: Back to Basics

Reading Time: 13 minutes

As you may have heard, Mule 3 has undergone a streamlining of its internal architecture. It’s now my job to explain what’s changed, why and what this means to you. I can’t promise it will be as exciting as a children’s movie but I will attempt to explain things as clearly as possible so that everyone can understand the concepts which in turn will help you use Mule 3 to its fullest.

This series of posts should be very useful both for existing Mule users wanting to understand the changes in Mule 3 and also for people who want to learn more about how Mule can be used to satisfy integration and messaging needs.

In this first blog post I’ll be taking a step back, away from Mule and its architecture and internals. We’ll remind ourselves what integration and messaging are all about, before going on to talk about the type of architecture that should ideally be used for integration or message-processing projects or frameworks.

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Hot Deploy from Mule IDE

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The Mule IDE does not natively support Mule 3’s new application structure yet, but not to worry, with the new 2.1 release of the Mule IDE you can still keep it hot when working in the IDE. Just follow a few simple steps and your apps will be doing the tango with Mule 3 while you code away in Eclipse.

If you haven’t installed the Mule IDE, follow the instructions here to get up and running. Don’t forget to download and install Mule 3.

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Come See us at Oracle Openworld

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Tomkatsu

MuleSoft will be at Oracle OpenWorld at booth #1833 (Moscone South) again this year. Come join us to experience firsthand the simplicity of Tcat Server and how it makes running Tomcat in production painless. We will also preview exciting new features of Tcat Server including dashboards, monitoring, alerting and fine-grained security permissions.


Learn how Tcat Server helps to close critical gaps in “plain vanilla” Apache Tomcat, such as lack of visibility into performance, manual configuration and application deployment, reacting to problems instead of proactively preventing them, and the age-old disconnect between dev and ops.

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Mule And ActiveMQ – A Perfect Match

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ActiveMQ in Action, an upcoming book from Manning Publications, may well end up being the perfect companion book for Mule In Action.

Happily Ever After…

Thanks to Mule ESB’s native support for Apache ActiveMQ and the capacity to transparently use Spring for advanced configuration needs, Mule has long been the ESB of choice to tap into ActiveMQ’s JMS goodness.

With the release of Mule 3 getting closer every day, it seems like a perfect time to celebrate the lengthy love affair between these two fine open source projects. I’ve written up a nice long article to introduce you to some of the juicier benefits of pairing Mule ESB and ActiveMQ.

Click here to read the article on MuleSoft.org, which includes:

  • a tour of common Mule+ActiveMQ usage topologies
  • new configuration examples (complete with GitHub download links)
  • tips to help you configuring Mule+ActiveMQ infrastructures for production
  • …and more!

Start hacking Mule 3 – with Mule IDE

Reading Time: 3 minutes

While the rest of the team was still busy with Mule 3 release preparations I took some time to update Mule IDE to be compatible with Mule 3.

What’s new?

I have put most work into creating new projects from the examples that come with the Mule distribution. This feature was rewritten to match the examples layout in Mule 2.2.x as well as in Mule 3. You’ll notice that the entire example is now copied over (minus a few files that do not make sense in an Eclipse project, such as build files). If the example requires additional jar files, they will be downloaded into the project. A lib folder will be created inside the new project to host those additional jars and they will be added to the project’s classpath.

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Say Hello to Mule 3

Reading Time: 14 minutes

The Mule team are really excited to announce Mule 3, the next generation open source ESB platform. It’s been a long time coming and the team have done a stellar job redefining what you should expect from an ESB. This release marks some significant new features as well as changes to Mule itself that result in the most powerful, light-weight and simple to use ESB out there.

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Improvements to exception handling for Mule 3

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Background

You may recall that in Mule 2.x, there were two places where you could configure exception handling strategies: 1. on the service 2. on the connector

Since the service receives events from endpoints which depend on the connector, and transformers are a grey area, it turned out that this scheme was very confusing, because it was never clear which strategy was going to handle which exception, and in some cases the same exception was even handled by both strategies!

Concept

For Mule 3, we have tried to simplify and improve our approach to exception handling. There are basically two scenarios for exception handling in Mule:

1. A message is in play – e.g., a routing or transformer exception
2. No message is in play – e.g., a connection exception or an initialization issue

#1 we are calling Messaging exceptions, and have defined the following interface:

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