Preface

The integration and IT landscapes have dramatically evolved since the first edition of this book was released in 2009. Both API and mobile platform adoption have exploded, changing the way IT thinks about application integration. Advances in virtualization technology and the ever-decreasing price of storage have led to massive, horizontally scalable computation and data storage approaches. The broader acceptance of polyglot application development has led to cross-platform messaging solutions. Businesses are beginning to realize the value of the convergence of these as big data and are extracting real value from them.

In many ways, the early promises of service-oriented architecture are being realized, albeit in ways very different than originally intended. The world has largely moved away from SOAP and XML and their associated standards, in favor of RESTful, JSON-based APIs. UDDI, never widely adopted, is being replaced by lighter-weight mechanisms for service discovery that look very much like “App Stores” for APIs. Messaging solutions are more lightweight and decentralized than their previously monolithic predecessors. Finally, top-down-driven integration and mediation solutions have been supplanted with bottom-up, agile frameworks.

As anyone who has been around the block a few times knows, however, the old stuff never really goes away. An insurance company’s mainframe that has been processing claim data without a hiccup for years isn’t going to be suddenly replaced, nor is the full stack of SOAP services carefully implemented by a financial institution before the emergence of REST. Nobody is going to flip the switch overnight on a production, multimillion-row, geographically distributed database simply because a newer technology exists.

Mule is a platform to tie all of this together. This book will show you how to use Mule to develop, deploy, manage, and extend integration applications.

The authors have used Mule extensively for years, successfully delivering implementations to both startups and established enterprises, including insurance companies, financial institutions, and governments. In these contexts, they’ve used Mule in a variety of capacities, from a lightweight mediation layer to full-blown ESB implementations.