Open Source Solutions

Our main interest in ESB is to supplement ETL, and inject real-time data into dashboards, OLAP, maybe even reports. BPEL/BPM as an offshoot of BI is also of interest. ServiceMix/Tuscany don't seem to be as useful in this regard. My guess is that ServiceMix/Tuscany will, as most Apache projects, be relegated to enhancing web servers, but not extend into other areas of the enterprise. Of course, everything might be pouring out of web servers in the future.

MuleCon was interesting mostly because of the enthusiasm of the customers. The week before we went to the Yahoo! sponsored open source content management system symposium [mostly to learn more about Alfresco, and to see the next generation of Joomla!]. That was pretty much all geek, all the time - very informative, but focused more on the technology, than the uses of the technology. MuleCon was smaller, and evenly distributed between presentations by customers and presentation by Mule core engineers. Not an hour went by without the phrase "use case" being bantered about. It was really very well done, despite some failure in conference organization. [It ended without a conclusion, just sort of petered out, with some folk in an unorganized discussion of the Scripps challenge, and others just milling about, wondering if the conference was over.]

People had come from all over the world, both to present and to participate; just over 100 were there for training on Tuesday, and about 150 were there on Wednesday. There were few Mule experienced people in the audience. Some had EAI or SOA/ESB experience [mostly Tibco] and were interested in Mule as an alternative, both for flexibility of adapting code, and for cost savings . Of course, the folk most willing to talk and to exchange business cards were other consultants. ;-) One interesting point in the side conversations was on the subject of configuration: some wanted wizards, others felt the XML files gave better control and facilitated understanding of the underlying process.

MuleSource seems very focused on their customers, and on providing business solutions through a flexible ESB without underlying infrastructure/technology assumptions. They should consider more such events, in varying locales. Hopefully, they learned as much about their potential users, as the participants learned about Mule.

We're blogged from MuleCon2007 throughout, and very much enjoyed the experience.