Cross-message state in Mule ESB - mule

I need to create an "accumulator" service to be used by Mule ESB applications.
This service will hold inbound messages until a certain number are received and then package those messages into a single outbound message.
This is the first time I've needed to write an ESB application that needs to maintain state (the collection of previously received messages) across inbound messages and I'm not quite sure how to get started.
I think what I need is a place to hang a reference to a data structure that holds my lists of inbound messages, but I'm not sure.
What's the best (most productive, most consistent with ESB best-practices) mechanism for managing "application-level" (i.e. cross-message) state data?
Thanks.

For this scenario you need to use the aggregator pattern. Please follow the below link .
http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation-3.2/display/32X/Message+Splitting+and+Aggregation

Related

Is there a way for Rabbit MQ consumer to get the latest message on init?

I am looking to replace an in-house key-value store and dispatch system and I keep hearing that RabbitMQ may be a solution.
I understand that sends and receives messages using queues, and that these events are triggered by producers creating messages, and consumers receiving them.
But what happens if a consumer is created after a message was sent? Can the consumer ask the queue what its last message was? If not, do I need to include some sort of database to store these messages? Or am I looking for some other technology?
A use case is that I want a GUI to get/set parameters that are used by other apps on a local network. On initialization, the GUI needs to know what the last values were.
In an attempt to answer my own question, it may be that RabbitMQ is not what I am looking for. I may want to instead use Kafka which stores its latest key:value pair in a table. Or I may want to use Redis. What do you think?
Thank you for your assistance.
I think I found a satisfactory answer to my question. I'm looking to create a request-reply model, which RabbitMQ is quite capable of handling. Upon opening the GUI, it sends a request to some other process for some variable, stored either in memory or in a database. That process responds with the requested data. Easy enough.

Can we define my architecture as an ESB?

I have read many different definitions of ESB (enterprise service bus) and it is not clear for me.
Here is my own definition: An ESB is an architecture and not a tool that allows heterogeneous applications to communicate with each other through a BUS. The particularity of an ESB is that it can have producers and consumers. For example, a producer can send a message to a topic/queue inside the bus and three consumers who are subscribers will receive the same message, so it avoids point-to-point flows.
The second particularity of the ESB is that it allows managing the security and logs in one place as everything goes inside the ESB.
I've also heard about "routes" that set rules in moving a message (with Talend ESB), but I don't really see the point (if you have any examples I'm interested). And of course, Web services can be created to expose data. These services must be scalable and resistant to "Single Point of Failure".
I created an architecture and would have liked to know if it's an ESB architecture.
(I made a mistake on my draw, it's not a Queue but a Topic!)
The steps of the process above:
Producer: it listens the changes (update, insert, ...) in different databases and as soon as there is a change, it retrieves the data and sends it to the queue.
Queue: The queue contains all the messages sent by the producer and will send them to the consumers.
Consumers: Consumers will make the data quality and insert the new data into a database.
For me, this architecture respects ESB because activeMQ acts like a bus. He acts here as mediator. What do you think ?
I think you are on the right track. However, I think there is an important distinction to make sure each message flow is using different queues. It is generally a best practice to have a queue per-message type.
The message flows can all co-exist on the same broker infrastructure, allowing you to have higher density, better utilization, and the ability to wiretap message flows in one place as needed.
In your case:
Database A -> queue://A -> Consumer A
Database B -> queue://B -> Consumer B
Database C -> queue://C -> Consumer C

What is difference between a Message Queue and ESB?

I was just reading about Enterprise Service Bus and trying to figure out how to implement it. However, the more I read about it, my conclusion was that it is just a glorified message queue.
I read about it here: What is an ESB and what is it good for?
We use RabbitMQ in our architecture quite a lot and what I was having hard time understanding was that there any many similarities between both concepts:
Both are basically post and forget
You can post a message of any format in both queues
My question is that what is it that an ESB does and RabbitMQ is not able to do?
I have not used RabbitMQ so I wont be able to comment on it. I have used ESB and currently using it.
ESB: It provides you multiple ways of subscribing to your message.Its mostly useful in Publisher-Subscriber model in which topics and subscription is used. You can publish your message payload in topics(similar to queues). Unlike a queue,topic provides us with capability to have more than one subscription for a single topic. This subscription can be divided based on your business need and you can define some kind of filter expression on those topic (also called channel)and with the specified filter a proper subscriber will pull the message from bus. Also one single message can be subscribed by multiple subscriber at a time. If no filtering is used on topics then it means all subscriber for that topic will pull the message from the channel.
This is asynchronous mechanism as you mentioned, post and forget. There is a retry mechanism in ESB where you can try subscribing the message for some number of times I think its 10 times(max) after which its sent in dead queue.
So if your requirement is to connect multiple enterprise system with loosely couple architecture then ESB is a good option.
I hope this was helpful to know about ESB

Audit mule inbound outbound messages

we are trying to audit all incoming/outgoing messages, header information in our mule flow.
For same we have tried to use 'wire-tap' which we dint found so useful also its working on mule 3.6.1 but giving error in 3.7.
Any idea/suggestion for auditing?
Ok let me add some more details:
What we are trying to do is- Whatever message comes or flows via flow components we want to copy it in some sub flow (say in queue) without interrupting the main flow so that we can check the message.
you can make it work in several ways
1) Wire tap is one of the choice. You can route your messages asynchronously to sub flow and sub flow will do the auditing work. But I don't know why you didn't found wiretap useful. Can you explain in more.
2) All the messages your receive from the main flow, those you can post to JMS queue. So another flow will read from there and do the auditing work. Use of this multiple projects can use the same piece of code and post JMS queue for auditing.
This can be done in many different ways and you kind of mentioned them in your question such as logger component and interceptor.
All the headers are available as message properties so if you log the entire message they are shown. Simply put an logger component after the inbound endpoint and one before the outbound endpoint and this is easily done.
If you need some log entries transformation you could always put that in a wire tap so you don't interfere with the functionality of your flow.

NServiceBus publishing in a multi system environment

I work on a system where we have the same website across multiple countries. Each of these websites has it's own services. Everything works well, but I've always found myself having to send messages rather than publishing as the messages otherwise other services where I know before hand it's completely irrelevant. It sounds pointless to me publishing to many services and then filtering it's relevance.
Is there a practice I should be dealing with when wanting to publish messages to a certain subset of services, how have others dealt with this problem?
By default endpoints subscribe to all messages. If you want only certain endpoints to subscribe to specific sets, then you need to configure your endpoint to DoNotAutoSubscribe(). You then must explicitly subscribe to each message type the endpoint will be interested in using Bus.Subscribe().
Could you describe your logic of determining relevance for particular endpoint systems ? the purpose of publishing and subscribing is that there are events in a system that other endpoints can subscribe to.
you should not know something about your subscribers. so how do you determine relevance ?
if these messages are not relevant for a specific endpoint why do you want to subscribe to these messages ?
If it truly is an event message then you need to publish the message. If you need to publish to a subset you could have a separate subscription store that the endpoint in question would use.
Typically it should be up to the subscriber to determine whether the received event is relevant but if you do have the information up-front then could go with the separate subscription store.
In my FOSS ESB project (http://shuttle.codeplex.com/) a ISubscriptionManager implementation has to be provided to the ESB to determine the subscriber uris to send published messages to. Although it may be overkill one could provide a custom implementation that contains some logic to perform the filtering; otherwise the separate subscription store.