how can i expose MULE to external world? - mule

we are using an ESB for any communication between the external world and our application environment, for its obvious uses .
i would like to understand , how can i make any call coming from the external world to go through the mule and vice versa.
what i mean is ,can i use a DNS which reroute all the calls coming form external world to MULE or can directly expose MULE as a service to the
external world so that mule will call an required implementation and sends the response .
i would like to know is there any other way i can handle this .
Thanks

Mule ESB it's production ready. It is very common to find it directly exposed to internet (of course with the proper security measurements any kind of deployment should follow).
Depending on the needs you could even find it behind nginx or apache proxies, behind MOM's and others.

Related

Starting the mule without mule-config.xml and to load the mule-config programatically

I am having a requirement like interacting the mules from different machines.I used the tcp inbound endpoint it is working perfectly if I configure everything in the mule-config.xml.Now my problem is i dont want to use the mule-config.xml but I want to load it programmatically.if any one have the solution pls update..
Thask.
The whole point of using Mule is that you can configure your flows simplistically, rather than writing complex code yourself. Having said that you can programmatically configure endpoints provided they are
outbound endpoints.
OR you using mulerequester:request
You cannot programmatically configure inbound endpoint.

Mule Inter - App communication in same instance

I have explored the web on MULE and got to understand that for Apps to communicate among themselves - even if they are deployed in the same Mule instance - they will have to use either TCP, HTTP or JMS transports.
VM isn't supported.
However I find this a bit contradictory to ESB principles. We should ideally be able to define EndPoints in and ESB and connect to that using any Transport? I may be wrong.
Also since all the apps are sharing the same JVM one would expect to be able to communicate via the in-memory VM queue rather than relying on a transactionless HTTP protocol, or TCP where number of connections one can make is dependent on server resources. Even for JMS we need to define and manage another queue and for heavy usage that may have impact on performances. Though I agree if we have distributed and clustered systems may be HTTP or JMS will be only options.
Is there any plan to incorporate VM as a inter-app communication protocol or is there any other way one Flow can communicate with another Flow Endpoint but in different app?
EDIT : - Answer from Mulesoft
http://forum.mulesoft.org/mulesoft/topics/concept_of_endpoint_and_inter_app_communication
Yes, we are thinking about inter-app communication for a future release.
Still is not clear when we are going to do it but we have a couple of ideas on how we want this feature to behave. We may create a server level configuration in which you can define resources to use in all your apps. There you would be able to define a VM connector and use it to send messages between apps in the same server.
As I said, this is just an idea.
Regarding the usage of VM as inter-app communication, only MuleSoft can answer if VM will have a future feature or not.
I don't think it's contradictory to the ESB principle. The "container" feature is pretty well defined in David A Chappell's "Enterprise Service Bus book" chapter 6. The container should try it's best to keep the applications isolated.
This will provide some benefits like "independently deployable integration services" (same chapter), easier clusterization, and other goodies.
You should approach same VM inter-app communications as if they where between apps placed in different servers.
Seems that Mule added in 3.5 version, a feature to enable communication between apps deployed in the same server. But sharing a VM connector is only available in the Enterprise edition.
Info:
http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/Shared+Resources#SharedResources-DefiningDomains
Example:
http://blogs.mulesoft.org/optimize-resource-utilization-mule-shared-resources/

Mule ESB integration with web applications

We have more than 5 corporate applications running on different servers with technologies like spring, struts communication between these application is point to point. We are planning to migrate this to ESB using Mule.
I didnt quite understand how mule works i have few doubts,
Mule is running in a different server do i need to deploy all my 5 aplications into the mule server.
I have spring application delployed on a tomcat server how this application is going to receive messages through mule or what are the configuration changes i need to do in my server or mule server.
Any advice or tutorials.
You need not deploy all you 5 applications in the Mule Server.
You said that all your application are currently point to point (which means that all are talking/communicating now through http protocol), similarly you can also use mule's http endpoints to communicate with all the 5 applications.
I.e. the spring application talking to another spring application can be modified to Spring application talking to Mule and Mule in turn talking to another Spring application .
You must learn the basics from the Documentation
http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/Mule+Fundamentals --> browse through the navigation on the lefthand side.
Mule is an integration tool. you no need to change any of your existing applications. All you need is to develop an mule application which can do the mediation/orchestration.
For connecting with your spring application you no need to change any configuration you need to use http:outbound connector inside your mule flow
Just go through http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/HTTP+Transport+Reference
So mule is based on SOA principle, so your 5 corporate service need not to be their in a single system. so if you want to consume the service/functionality of any of your 5 application, expose those service as web service, cloud be soap or rest. And you can call those service inside your mule. so in this case you have to create only 5 connection and where ever required you can refer to those connection inside mule configuration file.
#saravanan shanmugavel you need to use Mule ESB to orchestrate the communication between these application...ESB came into the picture to remove your point to point communication...you can create a proxy service for each of your service and one flow which will orchestrate communication between all...
All you need to do is change the application that is configurable according to mule server.
Please refer below link that will be helpful for understanding of mule that helps you better orchestrate communication between all.
https://docs.mulesoft.com/

How to configure a running Mule service's properties dynamically?

I would like a recommendation/idea on a method to configure properties for a running Mule service dynamically, i.e. I want the service to pick up the new settings without the need to restart Mule. Typically the kind of properties/settings I would like to change are FTP connector user ID, passwords, service URLs etc.
Any idea would be welcome.
Regards, Ola
Use the URI endpoint format do dynamically address endpoints. In simple cases you may be able to use the message properties in a TemplateEndpointRouter
Otherwise You need to write a component that composes the URI and sends the message to the dynamic endpoint using the MuleEventContext or MuleClient.
See here:
http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/MULE2USER/Outbound+Routers#OutboundRouters-TemplateEndpointRouter
http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/MULE2USER/Using+the+Mule+Client#UsingtheMuleClient-PerforminganEventRequestCall
http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/MULE2USER/Mule+Endpoint+URIs
Mule exposes all service configuration via JMX, but I don't see any obvious way to reconfigure the connectors without a restart. They are internally managing pools of connections.
If there is a limited, you can create connectors for each and reconfigure the routes via jmx attributes.
If it is to be fully dynamic you likely need to implement your own service component to manage the ftp connection. Exposing the connection management, configuration, and restarting via JMX should be pretty straight forward.

Under what circumstances does it make sense to run a WCF client and server on the same machine?

In Learning WCF, by Michele Bustamante, there is a section that describes a binding called the NetNamedPipes binding. The book says that this binding can only be used for WCF services that will be called exclusively from the same machine.
Under what circumstances would it make sense to use this? Ordinarily, I would write asynchronous code without using WCF... Why would Microsoft provide something for WCF that can only run on the same machine?
Look at it from the other direction. Once the service is built, you can run in in a variety of binding configurations. If it was a remote machine, you could use the HTTP or TCP bindings. Or, the service happened to be running on the same box, you have those options plus the named pipes option. The named pipes is just another option that is provided just in case you are running locally, but you should be able to switch to a different binding if you are running remote.
Yu could start with everything on the same box because you have less traffic, and use named pipes because it was the shortest path to the service. Then, if load demanded it, you can move the service to another box, and then change it to use TCP or HTTP instead.
You probably won't have a service that exposes only a NetNamedPipe endpoint - that doesn't make a lot of sense. But if you run your WCF service on a server, exposing service endpoints out to the world using the usual bindings, and you need e.g. a management or admin console or something like that, running on that same machine, it can make sense to use the NetNamedPipe binding since it's the fastest around.
Another possible scenario that I learned about is having an error collection service - any error or exception that happens is sent to a service to be logged. Again: that service would probably expose several types of endpoints, but if you have other services running on the same server, using NetNamedPipe binding to connect these two services makes a lot of sense.
I don't think you'll use the NetNamedPipe binding an awful lot in your WCF days - but it can definitely make sense in some cases and be quite useful in such specialized scenarios.