I am excited to announce release 39 of CloudHub! This release is based on a lot of user feedback, and contains a beta of our redesigned user interface as well as one of our most requested features – CPU & memory.
Redesigned Experience
We’ve been hard at work the last few months building a revamped user interface which helps you be more productive and integrates seamlessly with the Anypoint Platform for APIs. We’re excited to preview some of that work today. You’ll notice a clean, modern interface that makes it easier to get things done. For example, the home page now provides easy access to your applications, settings, and logs at a glance. It now also has a handy summary of resource utilization and the number of recent transactions processed.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform vs. Microsoft BizTalk Server
Last Updated August 26, 2016: Have you ever wondered if you should choose Microsoft BizTalk or MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform? Below are 10 points to consider when deciding on the best integration solution for your organization:
1. Extensibility to Best of Breed
BizTalk Server promotes a tightly coupled model in which many of the services are bundled within the product. While this is great for compatibility, it limits the ability of companies to use 3rd party applications that may provide better functionality. MuleSoft has built Anypoint Platform to be open and extensible to best of breed services and applications.
Included with Anypoint Platform are 120+ Anypoint Connectors for the most popular applications on the market, including Salesforce.com. Our broad partnership with Salesforce helps us deliver a secure, reliable, comprehensive integration.
When you’re not using pre-built connectors, MuleSoft’s DevKit allows your developers to build quickly Mule extensions that integrate directly with Anypoint Studio, the single graphical design environment for Anypoint Platform. This broad connectivity solution enables you to deliver integrations in days or weeks, not months.
2. Support for SaaS and Hybrid Deployments
The Connected Company will be both on-premises and in the cloud. To help organizations move to the cloud at their pace, MuleSoft provides the industry-leading iPaaS (integration platform as a service) solution, CloudHub. With CloudHub you have complete feature symmetry with on-premises Mule ESB. Write your code once and pick your deployment environment, build hybrid applications, connect your SaaS services, and take all your data to the cloud on Anypoint Platform.
BizTalk Services (the cloud version of BizTalk Server) is an untested technology in the enterprise that does not allow for feature symmetry. BizTalk Services only supports SOAP – no REST with very few endpoints, making it tough to talk to SaaS applications.
3. Connectivity to Microsoft
MuleSoft has 11 adaptors/connectors supporting Microsoft technologies, which is more than BizTalk currently supports, and 120+ other best of breed connectors available out of the box. We continue to add to this portfolio on a regular basis. The Anypoint Connectors for Microsoft are:
Coming soon: Service Bus, Dynamics AX, O365/Sharepoint Online, .NET RAML support, Visual Studio support
4. RESTful and SOAP APIs
At MuleSoft, we believe that APIs are the cornerstone of a Connected Company. This is why we have continued to push the RAML design language which, when combined with APIKit, makes building and maintaining API’s simple. We have also built out robust API management capabilities in our Anypoint API Manager. Manage policies, contracts and API analytics all from one easy to use portal. BizTalk Server still hasn’t addressed the needs of the modern enterprise to design seamlessly, build and manage SOAP or RESTful APIs on a unified platform.
5. Access to source code
MuleSoft provides the world’s leading open source ESB. The source code of our core technology is available for customers and prospects to view and troubleshoot. With BizTalk Server, this is not an option. Its commercial source code is considered proprietary software and accessing this would void the terms of your license agreement.
6. .NET and Java support
Too often, companies limit their ESB choices by making the development language, supported by the ESB, the primary concern. For example, many .NET teams constrain their search to only .NET-centric ESBs, leaving them few options. Mule ESB provides a language-agnostic platform that allows you to remove the language barriers when looking at new opportunities. To become a SOA organization, we must start thinking like a heterogeneous platform
MuleSoft is not a Java-only company; we are always building new components and connectors specifically addressing various coding languages, including robust .NET and C# connectivity. BizTalk yet to provide full support for Java based code. To connect to Java BizTalk requires a 3rd party bridging application, potentially adding thousands to licensing costs.
7. Developer Tooling
Customers that have switched from BizTalk Server to MuleSoft tell us that ease of use and productivity is one of the primary factors for changing vendors. AnyPoint Studio enables developers to design and debug solutions graphically or via XML and deploy applications on-premises or in the cloud in seconds. With BizTalk Server, advanced development skill and BizTalk certification is required just to properly setup and manage a BizTalk instance.
8. Pricing Model
On average, the total cost of ownership of Anypoint Platform is a fraction of the cost of traditional, commercial solutions. With Anypoint Platform, there’s no need to purchase a laundry list of products, deploy separate development or management tools or pay an additional fee for support. Furthermore, our annual subscription model means no large upfront cost to amortize over years or decades.
9. Support
Our award-winning support features 2 hour SLA’s for our top tier clients with access to our team of support specialists that sit next to the engineers and have a direct line to product management. BizTalk offers a 4 hour SLA and a complicated series of call centers before you get to an engineer.
10. Innovative Roadmap
MuleSoft is committed to keeping its customers informed of its new and exciting features. We continually provide updates via our open source community, blogs, and public and private product roadmap webinars to inform users and solicit feedback. Gartner has consistently recognized MuleSoft’s “completeness of vision” as tops amongst integration vendors. MuleSoft’s release cadence includes updates to the product every two months and major releases every six months. The integration roadmap for BizTalk has been publicly questioned by analysts, customers, and partners.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform: A connectivity platform that fundamentally changes the way companies do business. MuleSoft’s unified Anypoint Platform, the world’s leading connectivity platform for SOA, SaaS, and APIs, helps you deliver a Connected Company. As a company focused on integration, we will continue to innovate to ensure your present and future integration needs are not just met, but exceeded.
I am very excited to announce the general availability of the Anypoint Platform for APIs July 2014 release. This release places a broad set of rich API tooling at developers fingertips, allowing them to address the entirety of the API lifecycle in a more efficient and effective manner. The release also enables API program owners to deliver a robust API platform that can easily integrate with existing enterprise assets. The significant set of enhancements introduced in this release revolves around three core themes.
360 degree API life-cycle
This new release unifies the user experience across the API lifecycle to streamline the creation, management and consumption of APIs. Now users of the Anypoint Platform for APIs can access all functionality of the platform through a single pane of glass for enhanced usability and visibility across their API programs. This means that API owners can design APIs, publish portals, manage and monitor their APIs and enable API consumers (i.e. application developers) to explore the published portals and register their applications – all in a single product, accessed through a single interface.
One thing I’ve witnessed over the last few months as I’ve worked with dozens of customers is that, despite the fact that companies already have hundreds and thousands of APIs (anything that is an “interface” is an API in my mind), companies are still adding more. This includes the thousands of interfaces exposed by an SAP or Oracle, or the hundreds of SOAP web services, FTP jobs, asynchronous batch jobs, newer RESTAPIs. And let’s not forget the companies that have been acquired or partnered with, and all of their interfaces from their internal systems.
So there is a no shortage of APIs – far from it in fact. So, a “lack” of APIs is definitely not a problem.
When are there going to be enough APIs?
Short answer: Never.
Businesses are still banging on IT’s door progressively louder and louder saying, “give me more, and now!” It’s like the business partners that endless refills on their drinks.
Trust no one! Most security issues comes from assuming that no bad person is going to tamper with your input data. We usually pay more attention to it when processing the most common inputs, such as an HTTP request or some argument that’s going into an SQL query. But we usually don’t pay much attention to other types of resources that are also vulnerable to malicious thinking – such as an XML file.
External Entities are an XML feature which allow you to embedded an external source into your document. For example, let’s suppose that your application responds to queries using an XML schema, which contains a disclaimer footer. Your legal department is prone to changing the wording on it so it probably makes sense to take it from an external file, so that your templates (which are part of your deployed source code) are not modified. Such templates could look like this:
Here’s our weekly roundup of the top 5 integration and API articles of the week. Take a look, let us know if we missed any, and share your thoughts in the comments. Don’t forget to follow @MuleSoft to stay up-to-date on integration & APIs!
If you’re interested in Integration and APIs, don’t miss CONNECT 2014 London – the event behind the integration revolution!
An API is not only a building brick, it’s also a projection of a product vision, based on internal assets you can open to the world. Get ready for your next conversation when someone asks, “so what does API stand for?”
Governments are implementing sensor networks to streamline processes, cut labor costs and improve services. But extracting true value from these networks requires integration.
Gmail’s Latest Move Isn’t The End of Email, It’s A New Beginning
What a world cup! I do feel bad for 50% of the MuleSoft team though (given that we’ve got a big office in Buenos Aires). It’s exciting though, because this was a very exhilarating competition that truly reached a fever pitch here in the US where “football” is traditionally a game with pads, helmets, and ball that doesn’t really roll.
What was really interesting was how this was truly a, “World Cup powered by APIs.” World Cup organizer FIFA has stated that more than a billion fans worldwide accessed information about the tournament through its digital platforms. I personally watched many games on my mobile phone, my tablet, and on my laptop. In fact, I distinctly recall being in the middle of a long line and putting on the Brazil – Columbia game that was streaming over a 3G network in San Diego.
“This has been the first truly mobile and social World Cup”
– FIFA president Sepp Blatter.
What actually went behind the scenes of this whole experience was an API infrastructure that allowed media entities to expose their digital assets and stream live media over end user devices. There were countless mobile apps that were consuming APIs and even more digital assets behind those APIs.
