Month: March 2011

application networks

What is PaaS (Platform as a Service)

Posted on | by Ross Mason | 6 Comments on What is PaaS (Platform as a Service)
Reading Time: 9 minutes

With 2011 being touted as the year of the PaaS there are still many questions to be answered. I thought I’d offer up my $0.02.

Let’s quickly go over the basics of where PaaS sits. There are 3 defined service layers to the cloud: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Both IaaS and SaaS are easier concepts to understand and have been around longer. IaaS provides a virtualization layer of elastic compute resources that are available on demand, such as Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud. SaaS offers applications consumable over the web with pay as you go pricing, numerous examples include Salesforce, SuccessFactors, WorkDay and Inuit.

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Deployment best practices for Mule

Posted on | by michael.khalili | Leave a Comment on Deployment best practices for Mule
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Mule 3 had a ton of new improvements.  We’ve talked a lot about flows, cloud connectors and the like and offered webinars on each. Mule 3 also offers a new deployment model to support the deployment of multiple applications and hot deployment of those applications.

Are you looking to learn about how best to deploy Mule and Mule applications?  Should you deploy Mule standalone?  Should you deploy it on an application server? What are the pros and cons of each approach?

If so you should take a look at our recent webinar:  Mule Deployment Best Practices.  This 45 minute technical webinar offers an overview of this new deployment model and how it can improve the reliability and maintainability of your applications.

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Make the move to Mule 3 followup Q&A

Posted on | by Ken Yagen | Leave a Comment on Make the move to Mule 3 followup Q&A
Reading Time: 9 minutes

A week ago, we hosted a webinar on making the move to Mule 3.1. The goal was to introduce the new capabilities in Mule 3 and demonstrate the benefit they offer when working with Mule. More importantly we gave valuable tips on how to migrate your applications from Mule 2 to Mule 3. If you missed the webinar, the slides and an archived recording are available on the MuleSoft website.

Some of capabilities we highlighted include:

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Pimp your Mule Flow debugging session

Posted on | by Julien Eluard | Leave a Comment on Pimp your Mule Flow debugging session
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Mule Management Console 3.1 ships with the brand new Flow Analyzer. Select your server, interesting flows, click start and enjoy seeing real-time messages passing through mule! Click on an debug event and you will see the payload before and after each message processor of your flow.

Out of the box MMC will convert the payload to a string representation using custom toString method if any or by reflectively inspecting its individual fields. While in most cases this is sufficient an extension mechanism allows to customize this.

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Securing REST Web Services against LDAP

Posted on | by jaskirat.bhatia | 2 Comments on Securing REST Web Services against LDAP
Reading Time: 7 minutes

Many Mule users create RESTful services but they are not always clear on the way to authenticate and apply authorization to a RESTful Web Service. I have seen questions about this topic so I decided to write a tutorial that covers a common use case. We’re going to use Jersey, Spring Security and LDAP and of course Mule to pull  it all together.  I will show you how to do the following:

  1. Expose REST resource using Jersey
  2. Secure the REST resource using HTTP Basic Authentication
  3. Authenticate and authorize users against an LDAP Directory
  4. Apply authorisation based on users groups to this REST resource
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Feed my inbox; reading RSS feeds with Mule ESB – Part 3

Posted on | by Dirk Olmes | Leave a Comment on Feed my inbox; reading RSS feeds with Mule ESB – Part 3
Reading Time: 6 minutes

In part 2 of this mini-series I showed a flow that retrieves an RSS feed periodically, splits it and sends each RSS entry via email. In this part I’d like to show how to split up the flow a bit in order to enable unit testing.

To refresh your memory here’s what the flow currently looks like:

Testing this flow is hard if not impossible for a number of reasons:

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Mule’s new digs.

Posted on | by Admin | Leave a Comment on Mule’s new digs.
Reading Time: 4 minutes

After two years of using a theme that we can honestly describe as passé, we have recently overhauled our Blog in big ways. Let’s take a look at how these will benefit our readers:

New look & feel

Changing the look and feel of a site can have a very refreshing effect. We’ve updated our look to a slick, more modern version of its predecessor. This includes a roomier layout for our dev audience that visits us on their super large monitors, while still accommodating those that are still on 1024×760. Take a look at the before and after.

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Integration Patterns: Content-based Routing

Posted on | by Daniel Feist | 6 Comments on Integration Patterns: Content-based Routing
Reading Time: 7 minutes

The implementation of the Enterprise Integration Patterns, first documented by Gregor Hohpe, is an important aspect of Mule.

These patterns are accepted solutions to recurring problems within a given context and as such provide both a framework for both designing and building messaging and integration systems as well as a common language for teams to use when architecting solutions.

The fact that Mule implements these patterns greatly reduces the effort required when building integrations, you design your solution using these well-known patterns and then simply configure and use these same patterns in Mule.

In this “Integration Patterns” series of blog posts I’ll introduce the fundamental patterns people use when building Mule applications, noting anything specific to Mule and providing configuration examples. I’ll cover one pattern per post, let me know if there is anything specific you’d like me to cover. My first post covered the Content Enricher Pattern, today we’ll look at Content-based Routing.

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Apple Push Notifications with Mule Cloud Connect

Posted on | by Emiliano Lesende | 1 Comment on Apple Push Notifications with Mule Cloud Connect
Reading Time: 10 minutes

So you have written this new cool service (hopefully using Mule), and you even develop an insanely great iOS app to complement your new cool service. In todays article I’m going to show you how you can make your service even more awesome with Mule Cloud Connect by allowing your service to send push notifications to your iOS app.

What is Mule Cloud Connect?

Mule Cloud Connect is a technology part of Mule ESB 3 release, and allows developers to quickly and efficiently create new connectors to different cloud services. We thought really hard here at Mulesoft about how can we make our developer-base more productive, and how can we leverage the thousands of software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms out there without breaking a sweat.

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Announcing Mule 3.1.1 and new Examples Launcher

Posted on | by Mariano Capurro | 2 Comments on Announcing Mule 3.1.1 and new Examples Launcher
Reading Time: 6 minutes

The Mule team is very pleased to announce the availability of Mule ESB 3.1.1, CE and EE.  This is a follow-up release to Mule 3.1 and another step forward in innovation, connectivity, and usability.

Mule 3.1.1 adds:

  • Continued improvements to the online documentation.  This time, we’ve updated the reference documentation for transports and modules, adding fuller descriptions and more examples, in particular examples of using them within flows.
  • Support for CXF 2.3.1.
  • Fixes for over 60 important bugs.   Details can be found in the release notes.   As always, several of these are patches submitted by the Mule community, whom we’d like to thank for their continued interest and support.

New Examples Launcher

We made a big change to the examples that ship with Mule making it easier run examples, test them out and view the source. For those who don’t have a lot of time to spend taking a look at README files, startup guides or product documents in order to test Mule, you can now start Mule 3.1.1 in a new mode that will deploy examples and launch a web application to interact with them.

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