Month: February 2012

Application vs. Data Integration: Which is better?

Posted on | by Ross Mason | 2 Comments on Application vs. Data Integration: Which is better?
Reading Time: 6 minutes

This question boils down to one thing: are you part of the transaction or not?

Data Integration grew out of the adoption of relational databases and the need to move information between them. Typically, data integration is batch-orientated and deals with data at rest. In other words, the process that created the data has already completed.

Application Integration, on the other hand, deals with integrating live operational data in real-time between two or more applications. Typically an “event” will occur. For instance, when a customer places an order, this triggers an integration flow that updates and enriches data in other applications in real-time.

Continue reading →

Mule Tip: Multiple PropertyPlaceholders in same Mule Configuration

Posted on | by Mariano Capurro | 5 Comments on Mule Tip: Multiple PropertyPlaceholders in same Mule Configuration
Reading Time: 2 minutes

If you want to avoid including configuration parameters (probably connection related parameters) in your Mule configuration, you can use property placeholders, which will allow you to upload these parameters from a properties file. This enables you, for example, to have different property files for different environments (Dev, QA, Prod) or allows you to reuse the same value in different parts of your configuration.

Continue reading →

Using Mule with Drools and jBPM

Posted on | by Eugene Berman | 4 Comments on Using Mule with Drools and jBPM
Reading Time: 9 minutes

Mule 3 has many routing processors and expression evaluators that can be used to implement routing logic. However, sometimes business rules may be too complex. For example, one of our customers is a large logistics company which uses Mule for their warehouse routing. To handle their complex set of rules, they decided to use Mule with jBPM and Drools.

This example illustrates use of Drools and jBPM inside Mule, by implementing very simple order sorting and warehouse routing use case.  In this scenario all orders with weight greater than 50lbs should be routed to the warehouse A, and orders with weight equal to 50lbs or less should be routed to the warehouse B.

The sample orders are randomly generated and dispatched to the UnsortedOrders JMS queue.  The jBPM process consumes unsorted orders and invokes Drools to make a decision on which warehouse this order should be routed to.

Continue reading →