Overview of Mulesoft

  Overview of Mulesoft

What is Mulesoft ESB ?

Mule ESB is a lightweight and highly scalable Java-based enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration platform provided by MuleSoft. Mule ESB allows developer to connect various applications easily and efficiently.We can connect to different backend systems like Mainframe,AS400,databases,SAP, etc and convert data from one form to other.

Below is the figure showing Mulesoft ESB connection with various systems.

What is an ESB ?

ESB stands for enterprise service bus.ESB is fundamentally an architecture. It is a set of rules and principles for integrating numerous applications together over a bus-like infrastructure. ESB products enable users to build this type of architecture, but vary in the way that they do it and the capabilities that they offer. The core concept of the ESB architecture is that you integrate different applications by putting a communication bus between them and then enable each application to talk to the bus. This decouples systems from each other, allowing them to communicate without dependency on or knowledge of other systems on the bus. The concept of ESB was born out of the need to move away from point-to-point integration, which becomes brittle and hard to manage over time. Point-to-point integration results in custom integration code being spread among applications with no central way to monitor or troubleshoot.

Below figure showing simple ESB architecture connected with different backend systems.

The key advantage of an ESB is that it allows different applications to communicate with each other by acting as a transit system for carrying data between applications within your enterprise or across the Internet. Mule has powerful capabilities that include:

Service creation and hosting — expose and host reusable services, using the ESB as a lightweight service container
Service mediation — shield services from message formats and protocols, separate business logic from messaging, and enable location-independent service calls
Message routing — route, filter, aggregate, and re-sequence messages based on content and rules
Data transformation — exchange data across varying formats and transport protocols.

Why Mule?
Mule is lightweight but highly scalable, allowing you to start small and connect more applications over time. The ESB manages all the interactions between applications and components transparently, regardless of whether they exist in the same virtual machine or over the Internet, and regardless of the underlying transport protocol used.

There are currently several commercial ESB implementations on the market. However, many of these provide limited functionality or are built on top of an existing application server or messaging server, locking you into that specific vendor. Mule is vendor-neutral, so different vendor implementations can plug in to it. You are never locked in to a specific vendor when you use Mule.

Mule provides many advantages over competitors, including:

1. Mule components can be any type you want. You can easily integrate anything from a "plain old Java object" (POJO) to a component from another framework.

2. Mule and the ESB model enable significant component reuse. Unlike other frameworks, Mule allows you to use your existing components without any changes. Components do not require any Mule-specific code to run in Mule, and there is no programmatic API required. The business logic is kept completely separate from the messaging logic.

3. Messages can be in any format from SOAP to binary image files. Mule does not force any design constraints on the architect, such as XML messaging or WSDL service contracts.

4. You can deploy Mule in a variety of topologies, not just ESB. Because it is lightweight and embeddable, Mule can dramatically decrease time to market and increases productivity for projects to provide secure, scalable applications that are adaptive to change and can scale up or down as needed.

5. Mule's stage event-driven architecture (SEDA) makes it highly scalable. A major financial services company processes billions of transactions per day with Mule across thousands of Mule servers in a highly distributed environment.

Examples of ESBs : 
There are different ESBs are available in market,few of them are : 
1) Mulesoft
2) Tibco
3) Apache camel
4) Fuse ESB
5) Biztalk


You might like this:

1. Advantages of Mule ESB

2. Prerequisites for Mule Applications

3. Introduction of Anypoint Studio

4. Download & Install Anypoint Studio

5. Center for Enablement in Mulesoft

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