Open Source Solutions

Ron Park, VP of Engineering at MuleSource, gave a comparison of the Community and Enterprise editions of the Mule products starting with Mule 1.5 then Mule 1.6.

Ron also introduced Jackie, who is in charge of technical publications, and Scott Yuen, who heads support and services. These two areas are of noted improvement over last year [when neither really existed] and what is being made available today to Enterprise customers. In addition to formal documentation and support, there is a knowledgebase available to subscription customers, which contains over a thousand articles.

MuleHQ 3.1 new features include:

• Improved mule specific statistics
• Dashboards including patch tracking through the metadata
• Mass deployment management
• Local data storage of metrics

It should be noted that MuleHQ is intended for stand-alone Mule implementations, and not when Mule is embedded in other SOA tools.

Mule Saturn is included in the Enterprise edition to provide data visualization for a light-weight business activity monitoring service.

Mule Enterprise 1.6 should be out by May, 2008. Again it will include MuleHQ and Mule Saturn, as well as some premium connectors for JDBC, Apache CXF and native WebSphere MQ support.

Mule Enterprise 2.0 will have even more documentation [see Jackie] and the major difference will be the Migration Tools for Mule Core. There will be more premium connectors, such as for FTP, and improved reconnection strategies. Improvements and architectural enhancements to Mule Saturn and MuleHQ are also part of the roadmap. MuleHQ will also have changes to the plug-in architecture, moving forward towards hot deployments.

The community version of Mule 2 is available now, but there will be maintenance releases to Mule Community edition 1.4.

There will be features that will be in Mule Enterprise that won't be in Mule Community. Hot deployments and clustering/fail-over are examples of such features. How these features will be licensed is still being investigated with the lawyers. Mule IDE is open source and available, as is Mule Galaxy for governance, but the two of the working together are an Enterprise feature add.

As MuleSource evolves, I think the differences between the Community and Enterprise editions, the licensing, and the ability of the community to add enterprise-like features to the Community edition will be very dicey. We'll have to wait and see.