Mulesoft Tutorial

Mulesoft ESB

Mulesoft is an integration platform that helps developers in connecting applications together in a quick and easy way thereby enabling the exchange of data. It also helps in easy integration of existing systems, irrespective of the various technologies that applications make use of, including HTTP, JMS, Web Services, JDBC and many more. The ESB gives the advantage of real-time integration and orchestration of events or also in batch, can be deployed anywhere and has worldwide connectivity

You might be wondering what an ESB is and how this bus-like infrastructure helps in organizing your applications and systems. Let us understand it through the following section:

The concept of ESB arose due to the need to move away from point-to-point integration, which, over time, becomes brittle and hard to manage. Point-to-point integration results in custom integration code being spread among applications with no central way to monitor or troubleshoot. This is called as "spaghetti code" and does not scale since it creates tight dependencies between applications.

Get ahead in your career by learning Mulesoft through onlineitguru Mulesoft online Training

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an architecture.

It is a combination of rules and principles for integrating numerous applications together over a bus-like infrastructure. The main concept of the ESB architecture is that one integrates different applications by putting a communication bus between them. This enables each application to talk to the bus. This helps in decoupling systems from each other, allowing them to communicate without dependency on or knowledge of other systems on the bus.

ESB provides the following advantages:

It speeds up marketing your new initiatives

Productivity is enhanced, which translates to more apps developed within your organization

Allows leveraging your existing systems during app development courtesy the pre-built communication and transformation capabilities

One should be using an ESB if the answer for the following questions is ‘YES’!

Are you trying to integrate 3 or more applications or services?

Do you need to plug in more applications as time progresses?

Is there a need of using more than one type of communication protocol?

Is there a requirement for message routing capabilities like forking and aggregating message flows, or content-based routing?

Do the services you publish consumed by other applications?

Coming back to our topic of discussion, Mule ESB has the following capabilities:

Service mediation - creating message protocol and format independence among applications.

Service creation and hosting - serving as a lightweight container for exposing and hosting reusable services.

Data transformation - allowing data exchanges irrespective of the format or transport protocol.

Message routing - allowing messages to be rerouted, filtered, aggregated or re-sequenced based on rules and content.

Mule ESB is one of the best in the market. Let us take a look at 5 main reasons why it is a pole apart from its competitors:

Effective Scaling, both Up and Down: 

This means unlimited freedom for your teams to bridge together as many apps and systems as required

Ideally Embeddable: 

Embed it into a single app, directly

You can plug it into your app server

Embed into a JUnit test case

Integration of All Components:

Regardless of the Technology used. Not just integrating them under its umbrella it also improves communication across infrastructure of various apps and multiple systems.

Highly Accessible:

since it supports a wide variety of code languages. It comes with a large variety of widely used tools that your team might already be familiar with. This would mean fewer problems to the development team in writing custom code.

Reusability of Components:

The team is encouraged to reuse your infrastructure's components.

Lightweight:

its modular design helps you make it lighter by removing all the unused modules.

Mule Application Building Blocks

The Mule Palette is where the Mule application building blocks are separated into categories. Let us take a brief look at them, one by one.

Get ahead in your career by learning Mulesoft through onlineitguru Mulesoft online Training Hyderabad

Message Sources:

Message Sources is the first building block. It is a receiver that receives new messages and places them in the queue for processing.

Message sources are generally Anypoint Connectors. Connectors help in providing connectivity to external resources, such as:

Databases, protocols, or APIs.

Standard protocols like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, AMQP.

Third-party APIs like Salesforce, Twitter, or MongoDB.

Anypoint Connectors:

The second building block is the Anypoint connectors. Anypoint Platform has more than 120 pre-built connectors - 30 packaged with Anypoint Studio and the additional ones available in the Anypoint Exchange.

Connectors can be accessed directly from Anypoint Studio or at https://www.mulesoft.com/exchange

There are 2 main types of Anypoint Connectors:

Endpoint-based connectors

Operation-based connectors

Endpoint-based connectors

There are two endpoints in a flow. Either inbound or outbound.

Inbound endpoints serve as a message source for a flow.

Outbound endpoints send information to the external system.

Operation-based connectors

In order to structure the building blocks, these connectors require the specification of an operation. This category includes most connectors not based on a standard communication protocol.

You might be a little confused with Endpoints and Connectors. A Mule-specific connection to an external resource of any kind is called a Connector. But an endpoint is a flow-level element that is configured to receive and/or send messages from and/or to external resources.

An endpoint is created, when you drag a connector from the Mule Palette. Connectors and endpoints, both are global elements.Get ahead in your career by learning Mulesoft through onlineitguru Mulesoft online course Hyderabad

Share: