Reading Time: 8 minutes

We've negotiated discounts for our blog readers and community members to get 35% off on Mule in Action by David Dossot and John D'Emic or Open Source ESBs in Action by Jos Dirksen and Tijs Rademakers. A few weeks ago, Andrew Perepelytsya blogged about these books, which you can now purchase on the Manning website. To take advantage of the discount, enter “msource35” during checkout.

Here's a bit about each book:

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in Action

An Enterprise Service Bus—or ESB—lets a exploit an enterprise messaging service without writing a lot of custom code. With its recent 2.0 release, Mule has become the most widely used open source ESB, providing a viable alternative to expensive commercial options. As the basis for a standards-based SOA implementation, Mule provides easy with popular Java-based software such as Spring and JBoss. Mule is designed to support the messaging patterns defined by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. And because it's open source, developers can readily customize Mule to meet specific needs.

Mule in Action is a comprehensive tutorial that introduces the Mule ESB along with ESB development best practices. Designed for working Java developers, this authoritative book explores the architecture and the main features of Mule 2 through numerous running examples. The book starts with a quick overview of ESB technology and a bit of Mule history—including the key changes between Mule 1.x and Mule 2. You'll learn to configure Mule and then get straight to the good stuff—putting Mule to work.

Because the core of an ESB system is handling message traffic, you'll take a deep dive into the way Mule handles data with chapters on sending and receiving, routing, and transforming data. Next, you'll take a close look at Mule's standard components and how you can roll out custom ones. Then you will learn more about running Mule in production with chapters about deployment, logging, and monitoring.

The book closes with a set of chapters on the nuts and bolts of working with Mule. You'll take Mule farther by learning techniques for testing, performance tuning, BPM orchestration, and even a touch of Groovy scripting.

Open Source ESBs in Action

Choice is usually a good thing for consumers but it can be difficult to navigate the landscape of Open Source ESBs. I believe this book is extremely valuable for readers looking to choose an ESB and looking to get a stronger grasp on how to implement an ESB using open source projects. I found the case studies in section III particularly useful since they pull together many of the concepts learned throughout the book.

This book guides the reader through a logical journey of discovery and demonstration to deliver a solid understanding of the core ESB concepts and how they can be used in the real world. Armed with this book and the wealth of open source projects available I think the reader will be ready to take on any ESB project. Open Source made ESBs a lot more fun, go and enjoy yourself!
—From the Foreword by Ross Mason, Creator of the Mule Project , Co-founder and CTO of MuleSource.

The need for enterprise integration is widespread for the simple reason that businesses require independent applications to exchange information with each other. A CRM application must know about the order history of a customer, but that history is stored in the sales application. A technology that companies increasingly use to integrate enterprise applications is the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

Open-Source ESBs in Action describes how to use ESBs in real-world situations. You will learn how you can implement the various features of an ESB such as transformation, routing, security, and connectivity using the example of two open-source ESB implementations: Mule and ServiceMix. The book presents general principles and patterns of ESB use, as well as a structured approach to solving common integration problems through examples.

Working in integration projects is exciting, with new technologies and paradigms arriving every day. In this area, open source is playing a more and more dominant role with projects such as Mule and ServiceMix. Open-Source ESBs in Action will help you to learn open-source integration technologies quickly and will provide you with knowledge that you can use to effectively work with Mule and ServiceMix.