Year: 2010

With a Mule and a Toad involved, one could expect that a third character would quickly need to be added to the cast: a princess to ride the former and kiss the latter. But then, what would be so exceptional about it? Because, actually, this story is about exceptions and their graceful handling. Moreover, the story takes place in the clouds, and princesses don’t fly so well…

So let’s come back to our main protagonists: you know Mule ESB already but you may not have heard about Hoptoad, an on-line service from thoughbot that takes care of aggregating exception messages and presenting them on a very well-crafted dashboard. Hoptoad is well known in the Ruby community, as it was initially built for Rails application, but any application that can post XML over HTTP, or use one of the numerous clients, can benefit from it.

As more and more applications get deployed in the cloud, using cloud-based services is starting to make a lot of sense for anything that’s outside the realm of a business’ core. Dealing with errors falls into that category. In this post, we will look at how your Mule applications could leverage Hoptoad for handling exceptions. Even if you don’t run Mule ESB on CloudCat and even if you’re already benefiting from the advanced error management features of Mule’s Management Console, you’ll still be interested to read on and learn about the construction of a custom exception handler for Mule.