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/
Related
could someone please help me what is the purpose of Mule Agent, how it works and what are the scenarios where we can use mule agent?
Thanks,
Venkat.
Mule agent is used to monitor and control Mule servers and as well as using Mule agent API you can
1) Controlling applications, domains and services
2) List, deploy, undeploy or redeploy domains
3) List, deploy, undeploy, get status of, start or stop applications
4) Publishing Mule metrics to external monitoring systems
For more details read the mule documentation
https://docs.mulesoft.com/mule-agent/v/1.1.1/
I am working with Mule ESB and instead of using Mule Management Console (MMC). I just want to load balance so that if I am exposing my Mule ESB as a Service so in that case I don't want to use load balancer to balance my Mule ESB , because once the request will come Load Balancer, it is the single point of failure in case if it is down. So I just need a use case how to Expose Mule as a Service with Optimized Load Balancing without using MMC (Mule Management Console).
For load balancing incoming HTTP request, over multiple Mule instances, you will need a external loadbalancer. Mule ESB Enterprise Edition nor MMC will help you with that.
You can use a commercial one, such as a F5 BIP-IP, or setup a HAProxy. To avoid the loadbalancer to be a single point of failure you can setup a redundant HAProxy.
For JMS make sure to setup a external message broker cluster and connect to it using the normal jms:inbound-endpoint that way Mule will act as a competing consumer and you will achieve load balancing of messages.
I would also advice you to have a look at "MuleSoft Blueprint: Load Balancing Mule for Scalability and Availability" that covers this. It is a bit dated but most of the information in there is still valid.
It's unclear what transport are you using, anyhow you have just limited number of options.
Use Mule EE clustering feature for the VM transport.
Use a load balancer
Use a transport that support competing consumers like JMS or AMQP.
Could you provide a more detailed explanation of you deployment so I can provide more extact info?
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.
I like to call a flow from another project in Mule. Is that possible.
If its so please provide me the details how it can be achieved?
Thanks in advance.
If they are separate projects(even on the same JVM) then you cannot use flow-ref but will have to use a transport such as JMS, HTTP etc. If you are using Mule 3.5 Enterprise Edition then you can use the VM transport to communicate between projects using the new shared resources and domain functionality. More info on that here: http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/Shared+Resources
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/