In today’s post, I’d like to tell you a short story about a bizarre love triangle between a server-side application (Gmail), a client (Mailbox), and the “hero of the day” (API Notebook).
Before starting, let me mention that API Notebook is a web-based, persistent, JavaScript scripting workspace that enables live testing and exploring of APIs. It’s an example of literate programming. Hence, it’s a good idea to use it to code the script and tell the story:
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With Labor Day officially behind us, the summer has come to an end. For some people that means going back to school. For others it means going back to work, dusting off that coffee mug, and filling it up with whatever it takes to get the job done. For the newly formed developer relations and marketing team here at MuleSoft, it means hitting the road, and taking the company back to its roots… developers.
Over the next few weeks, you’ll be able to find us at some of the most exciting developer conferences and events taking place this fall. So whether you’re looking to complement your PHP skills, build out your API strategy, or simply learn how every developer can be an integration developer in the time it takes to say “It’s good to see you, Max the Mule,” here’s where we’ll be in the flesh this coming month: Continue reading
The benefits of applying the principles of SOA when catering to the IT needs of your organization are clear in a business-driven, vendor-neutral architecture. It considers all requirements from the perspective of the business process and delivers implementations in order to automate the same. The implementations themselves, driven by the same SOA principles and goals, are not bound to any one particular vendor because they are intrinsically interoperable, that is, they expose and consume Services or APIs (we use the terms interchangeably here).
The service, which is the building block of SOA architecture is reusable because it is agnostic to all business processes. It is effectively resused when it forms part of a composition, which typically maps to an abstraction of a business process. The SOAP standard has long been the backbone of SOA Service Interface design and continues to thrive inside the enterprise. An alternative standard in the form of RESTful Services has long been popular to engineers who prefer its simpler, more lightweight approach to the same problem. Regardless of the type of Service, SOA recommends governing and managing your initiative so that the reusable services do actually get reused and that the recurring logic typically needed to host these (security, quality of service, compliance, etc.) can be applied in the form of centralized and resusable policies.
As the New Enterprise enthusiastically embraces the vast array of discreet software solutions available in the cloud, it now seeks to leverage the single factor which has brought about the huge success of all of these SaaS offerings: their API-first approach. Building on the wisdom and solid principles of Service Oriented Architecture, the New Enterprise exposes RESTful Web APIs which can be consumed by the various channels of business (mobile, web, office, partners, resellers, etc.). In this way, it exposes its core business as a service, perhaps consumable in unforeseen ways beyond the enterprise! Thus, the suite of services and the orchestrations that invoke them can be easily leveraged and put to new use by facading them with a simple RESTful API, easily consumable by the client apps used in each of the channels.
With this post, I’d like to introduce you to the Anypoint Platform for APIs, which caters to the entire lifecycle of service and API design, development, deployment and API management – all on a single platform. We do so by showing how Anypoint Platform can cater to an omni-channel initiative within a retail business.
One of the greatest challenges API developers face is creating an API that is flexible enough to pass the tests of time and technology. In other words, creating an API that is built to last. Here are some tips to help you ensure your API has a happy, and long life expectancy – saving you a lot of frustration, and your company a lot of money!
“Unfortunately, people are fairly good at short-term design, and usually awful at long-term design.”
– Dr. Roy Fielding, Creator of REST
The first step to building an API for longevity is understanding that your API should be built to last beyond the current release, and even beyond your current roadmap. You want to build an API that developers can implement fearlessly, without worry that it will change in a few months, or even within a couple years.
After all, there is almost nothing that developers hate more than APIs that are constantly changing – as it breaks their code and destroys their application. In fact, I think more developers are more understanding of bugs than they are of repeated backwards compatibility breaks.
The recent release of the Anypoint Connector for .NET opens up many opportunities for plugging into .NET based rules engines. Since the .NET Connector allows developers to call out to native .NET code, these rules engines can be easily integrated as a result.
Utilizing a rules engine promotes efficiency in system interfaces where some business logic needs to be executed and this logic can be frequently updated. You could wire all of this logic into your integration application via custom code or using several routers but these rules become difficult to maintain in code and may require several re-deployments as changes are introduced. Using a rules engine allows developers to decouple business logic from integration logic and as a result, rules can be easily maintained.
MuleSoft recognizes that organizations may have made significant investments in .NET based rules engines and these rules may need to be extended from their legacy platforms for a period of time. As a result of business transformation, there may be new requirements that are better suited for a modern integration platform to address in order to support API or SaaS integration use cases. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform is able to support these use cases by providing the agility and connectivity to enable these business scenarios while supporting an existing rules engine platform.
To demonstrate this concept, we will take a recent customer scenario for connecting Anypoint Platform to the BizTalk Rules Engine. This MuleSoft customer has seen their IT landscape evolve and they now have requirements to support SaaS based endpoints and comprehensive API lifecycle management. Much like any organization, there were some timing constraints in making a complete transformation. As a result, they wanted to continue to leverage their legacy rules engine for a period of time while this transition was taking place.
In this simplified walk-through we are going to have a consuming application that would like to perform a credit check on a particular customer request. This scenario is well suited for using a business rules engine as there is different logic involved in performing this credit check that can change frequently. When the credit check logic does require modification, we do not have to redeploy a lot of different components; just a set of business rules. A rules engine provides a ‘separation of concerns’ that allows an ESB to focus on what ESBs are good at: connectivity and routing.
In this blog post we discussed some real-world concepts and challenges that Connected Enterprises are encountering. We were able to provide a solution that allows organizations to be flexible while enabling innovation that allows organizations to meet their business objectives.
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For many banks, back office systems for such critical functions as deposit accounting, loan servicing, and payment processing have been in place for decades, running on huge legacy mainframes. According to industry analysts, IT departments spend 70 to 90 percent of their budgets managing and maintaining these disparate systems, leaving little left over for new initiatives.
In addition, with poor operational efficiency a barrier to growing revenues, banks have prioritized reducing exceptions, delivering transparency, and improving system interoperability to increase technology ROI.
But it’s not enough to “run the bank” as some in the industry refer to business as usual spending. IT departments also need to “grow the bank”—delivering new products and services to meet customer demand. For example, according to the World Payments Report 2013, customer demand and innovation is driving the global mobile payments market, with volumes tripling over the past 4 years. Much of this growth comes from non-bank providers who have outpaced banks in delivering innovative and customer-centric mobile payment solutions, raising customer expectations. In an effort to keep up, banks are expanding mobile and tablet banking features.
However, rigid, monolithic legacy technology is restricting the ability of banks to meet the demands of increasingly web-savvy digital natives, accustomed to performing transactions instantly, whenever and wherever they want. Whether a bank decides to undertake a major “rip and replace” modernization program or refresh their architecture with newer technologies such as web services, cloud computing, APIs or OpenStack, integration is the key to growing the bank. For example, in order to enhance a corporate mobile banking app with real-time payment tracking, a bank could use a private API to send and receive data to the back-office payment system using web services.
A next generation connectivity platform enables application integration across on premises and cloud systems, web services orchestration and governance, and API creation and management, all on one platform. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform is the world’s leading connectivity platform for SOA, SaaS, and APIs. It enables financial services firms to realize the vision of a Connected Bank. Here is our infographic showing how leading financial institutions are realizing this vision:
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.
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.
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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:
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.
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.
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:
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Coming soon: Service Bus, Dynamics AX, O365/Sharepoint Online, .NET RAML support, Visual Studio support
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 REST APIs. 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.
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.
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