Processing messages asynchronously is an important technique when developing integration applications. Asynchronous applications are typically easier to scale, allow for the implementation of reliability patterns and sometimes better reflect use cases in the real world.. Mule, not surprisingly, offers a wealth of opportunities to process messages asynchronously.
Continue readingMonth: February 2012
Asynchronous Message Processing with Mule
Salesforce Goes Real-time
With the recent Spring 12 release of Salesforce very few would have noticed a little unsung feature that will change the way many applications interact with with Salesforce. The Streaming API went GA and allows to listen to changes to objects in the Salesforce platform rather than polling. Salesforce joins the ranks of other leading APIs such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that all offer real-time APIs to enable users to consume data in real-time, as events occur.
Using PGP Security: explained from the top
As you probably know, Mule provides pretty good support for PGP encryption (check the related links for further info on Mule’s PGP support). What we’re going to do in this blog post is provide a step-by-step, real life use case for PGP encryption. We’ll take a ride all the way from key generation to Mule configuration.
Continue readingNew Cloud Connector: Integrating with Intacct
Intacct is an award-winning financial management system with over 5,000 customers worldwide. Intacct is often said to be the next logical step for companies that have outgrown QuickBooks Online. Since MuleSoft uses Intacct internally, it was natural that we needed a cloud connector to it in order to automate our internal business processes.
![Intacct_Standard](/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Intacct_Standard-300x73.png)
As an example, we have a fully automated invoice creation process so that when a sales opportunity in Salesforce is marked as won, this triggers an integration processes that automatically creates a customer invoice in Intacct based on the product and customer data captured in the sales opportunity. This integration completely eliminated the need for tedious and error-prone data entry tasks in our accounting department. This is just one example of how you can leverage the Intacct cloud connector in order to automate your business processes.
Continue readingUsing XPath expressions on an XML document with namespaces
The other day I helped a customer figure out a little XPath problem: they had an XML document and wanted to process it depending on an XPath expression. Here’s the Mule config that shows what we were trying to achieve:
Continue readingFirst Aid kit for Mules
Reading Time: 11 minutesThe alarms go off. You get an alert on your cellphone. You look at your systems dashboard and notice that your Mule server, which was happily chewing messages until just a minute ago, is struggling. What can you do? Continue reading
Zero Downtime API Upgrades With iON
We recently pushed out an update to iON which makes building APIs in the cloud better than ever: zero downtime upgrades. Without you having to do anything, we ensure that your application is able to continually serve requests while you’re updating it.
The way this works is simple. Let’s say you have version 1.0 of your application in production and you’re about to release version 2.0. Because version 2.0 may take a few moments to start, iON will keep version 1.0 running while version 2.0 starts. Once version 2.0 is fully started, iON will update your domain name to point to your new Mule instance and shut down version 1.0. With no operations team at all, you’ll have managed to implement what many API providers find extremely challenging to do!
You’ll see that while your application is updating, your application status will be green, but with an up arrow, indicating that it is being updated:
![app-updating](/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/app-updating.png)
What happens if your deployment fails? iON will keep your old version running while you get a chance to look at your logs and correct the problem. You’ll know that this has happened by the warning label that appears next to your application:
![app-failed-update](/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/app-failed-update.png)
We hope that you enjoy this feature. It makes building APIs a snap!
Announcing Mule 3.3 Milestone 2
![next step](/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/next-step-300x199.jpg)
Last month we released Mule 3.3 M1, our first milestone on the way to Mule 3.3. While for production you should use Mule 3.2.1, we hope these milestones are a great way to play around with the latest and greatest features. This is a great opportunity to provide feedback and have an impact on what we are doing for the Mule 3.3 release.
We’ve been busy working on Milestone 2 during January, which we have just made available publicly. This blog post will take you on a brief tour of what we’ve been up to. On the highlighted list, we have upgraded Spring Framework to its latest version so you can keep up using the new features and enjoying the latest bug fixes. We also introduce the forEach message processor which simplifies the iteration over a collection of elements in the current message. We keep improving CXF support and ease of use to make your life easier. We also implemented new exception strategies on error handling which makes the setup of common error handling scenarios really simple. By the way, you are still on time to steer the course of Mule 3.3. Here is how. Let’s take a look at what’s new!
Securing SOAP Web Services using WS-Security
Mule allows us to expose services to the web through CXF, but what happens when these services handle sensitive information that we don’t want just anybody to read or change? We need to be able to authenticate who is consuming the Web service and determine if the user should have access to the service or not.
In this post we are going to show you, step by step, how you can use the Username token profile to validate the user identity using a Spring Security authentication provider running in Mule.
Continue readingTwitter Complex Event Processing (CEP) with Esper and Drools
Complex event processing engines are a natural fit for event driven platforms like Mule. Native CEP support has been available in Mule since version 3.2 by way of the Drools Module. The Esper Module now offers an alternate way to leverage CEP in your integration applications. Esper is a robust, performant, open source, complex event processing engine. Let’s take a look at how to use Esper with Mule and then see how it compares to Drools’ CEP support.
Continue reading