In the previous installment of the Beyond Integration series, we talked about some strategies for evolving legacy monolithic systems into finer grained services orchestrated by Mule ESB. As mentioned in this earlier post, following such a path opens the door for implementing new business operations by using the newly created services in novel and previously impossible ways.
One of the main concerns of modernizing legacy application consists in reducing coupling in all its forms. This is why reducing systems and components coupling, by establishing cleaner and clearer interfaces, is often one of the very first steps taken in such an evolution process. Another form of coupling that needs to be taken care of is temporal coupling. Systems that tended to synchronously depend on each other are time-decoupled by the introduction of a messaging intermediation tier, leading to an overall architecture that scales better and is more resilient to failures.
In essence, reducing time-coupling generally translates into evolving from an invocation-driven architecture to an event-driven architecture. In today’s post, I will present how using Mule can be an enabling first step towards the roll-out of such an architecture.
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