Appendix C. Mule Enterprise Edition

This appendix describes the differences between Mule Community Edition, which this book is based on, and Mule EE, the Enterprise Edition of Mule provided by MuleSoft Inc.

High-availability clustering

Mule Enterprise Edition provides an HA solution that allows multiple Mule servers to form a distributed memory cluster. This enables stateful message processors, such as the idempotent message receiver, to transparently distribute their state in a cluster. It also allows some transports, such as the file transport, to parallelize work across clustered nodes. Message failover between nodes is also supported, provided that applications are structured with the reliability patterns discussed in chapter 7.

Mule Management Console

The Mule Management Console (MMC) is a web application deployed on premises to manage multiple Mule standalone and HA servers. In addition to monitoring and managing Mule servers, it handles the entire lifecycle of Mule applications, allowing the registration, deployment, starting, debugging, stopping, and monitoring of them at runtime. Business events, another feature of MMC, track messages and KPIs across Mule applications and flows.

Additional and enhanced transports

Mule EE provides additional and enhanced transports that aren’t available in Mule CE. The WebSphere MQ connector, for instance, provides WSMQ-specific functionality not present in the JMS transport. The SAP transport, also not available in CE, simplifies integration with SAP systems. The JDBC transport is enhanced in Mule EE, offering support for large-dataset retrieval, batching, and outbound-stored procedures.

DataMapper

DataMapper provides a graphical facility to define message and payload transformation; it currently supports XML, JSON, CSV, POJO, Excel, and fixed-width files. It provides a simpler alternative to implementing either programmatic Mule transformers or complex XSLT transformations.

Anypoint Enterprise Security

Anypoint Enterprise Security offers additional security features for Mule EE. These include the following:

• Mule Secure Token Service (STS) OAuth 2.0a Provider
• Mule Credentials Vault (encrypted values of properties in property files)
• Mule Message Encryption Processor
• Mule Digital Signature Processor
• Mule Filter Processor
• Mule CRC32 Processor
• IP White Listing

Anypoint Service Registry

Mule EE applications can take advantage of Anypoint Service Registry, MuleSoft’s SOA governance platform. Anypoint Service Registry lets users apply policies, such as throttling and security, to Mule flows at runtime.

Hardened code line

Mule EE customers get access to incremental “dot” releases that contain bug and performance fixes that aren’t made available to CE users. These fixes are rolled into major releases (for example, 3.4.0) that are made available to CE and EE users on a less frequent basis.

Support and services

Follow-the-sun support is available 24/7 to subscribers of Mule EE. EE subscribers also have access to MuleSoft’s services team, which can be used for architecture review, training, and tactical consulting engagements.