The Ricston Blog - Life in SOA with the Mule ESB

Upcoming Features: RSS in Mule

Antoine Borg — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:00:47 +0000

Those of you who are keeping a close eye on expected changes for Mule 3 will certainly have noticed that a number of new and improved features will make their debut soon. One interesting addition to our favourite ESB is the introduction of RSS support as mentioned in this JIRA. Not only is this a clear sign [...]

Improvements and Fixes

Antoine Borg — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:00:55 +0000

One of the advantages of Mule is that it is open source. As we all know, this means that we can poke around and tweak the source code to our needs. While this is certainly useful, it is far better to make sure that the main code base is changed. This is true for [...]

A Merry Little Stream

Antoine Borg — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:00:48 +0000

Mule’s file connector allows us to read and write files to and from the underlying file system. Conveniently, we can also use stream large files rather than reading the whole lot in but what is the difference in behaviour in each case? If we had to read a whole file into memory before processing it, [...]

Component Clones

Antoine Borg — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:00:57 +0000

When you run Mule, your services (and their components) are initialised and ready to process inbound messages. Mule will create a new object instance for each request but this may not be what you want to happen. Mule does this behind-the-scenes cloning of your component purely because it can. Doing so means that it [...]

Inheriting Models

Antoine Borg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:00:28 +0000

I wrote about how you can have multiple models in a Mule application and how this is a convenient way to group services based on, say, exception handling. What if the models are in different configuration files? This is a common development technique. Imagine having two developers both working on a Mule application but [...]

Mule Model: What Is It Good For?

Antoine Borg — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:00:43 +0000

In the good old days of Mule 1.x, the Mule had a specific purpose related to threading or, sometimes, streaming of data. People tended to stick to the default model more often than not. This changed in Mule 2.x In Mule 2, the model is nothing more than a logical container that lets [...]

Cryptic Error #1

Antoine Borg — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:00:07 +0000

I work with Mule on a regular basis and am used to the error messages that may sometimes seem cryptic to the untrained eye. The truth is that they are not cryptic at all, if you know what to look for. Nowadays, I tend to look at an error and can diagnose common or familiar [...]

Service Statistics

Antoine Borg — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:00:49 +0000

Continuing on the theme of a ServiceAware service, what if you wanted to just be able to extract certain statistics from your Mule services at run time? I added the following method to the ServiceAware component that I wrote about in last week’s post: public String returnStatistics (Integer theRequest) { switch (theRequest) { case 0: return "Asynchronous [...]

Reacting to Your Environment

Antoine Borg — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:00:10 +0000

Back after a brief hiatus, I thought I’d build upon one of my previous articles related to Mule-aware services. In that article, I explained how a service can become aware of its surroundings and the Mule environment it is in. Naturally, services should not be so tightly coupled to the framework, so this mechanism is discouraged. [...]

Short Circuiting The Response Flow

Antoine Borg — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:00:22 +0000

Today’s guest post is from Stephen Fenech, Consultant at Ricston who talks about his most recent Mule engagement. A couple of weeks ago I was at SwissCom, the ‘leading Swiss provider of innovative communications and IT solutions’. They are currently using Mule in one of their major projects and we came across an interesting scenario. For [...]