Open Source Solutions

Mahau, the Director of Marketing gave the introduction. There are more than double the number attendees this year as last. All members of the core development team are here.

Dave Rosenberg provided the year in review.

• Four babies, all girls, have been born to the Mule "family" in the past year
• MuleSource launched in Japan
• Mule Galaxy for governance was released
• Mule2.0 and Mule RESTPak coming soon

Dave began discussing that building good products is important, but building the right products is equally important. Customers have been successful in SOA when the use an ESB as a foundation. Governance [Mule Galaxy] is the next important step. Mule Saturn for data monitoring and MuleHQ for system monitoring & management round out the Mule offerings.

The MuleForge has a lot of new material from developers in 118 countries.

From the survey that MuleSource recently conducted with their users, while up-front cost is a consideration, the most important value from open source software is that the users get a feeling of control by having access the code.

When Dave talks about the growing ecosystem, it now includes over 40 partner companies.

Ross Mason, creator of Mule and CTO & co-founder of MuleSource provided the Mule Product Updates and Roadmap session.

A year ago, there was the mule project being transitioned from an open source project to an enterprise product, including the announcement of MuleHQ.

This year, the open source offerings are the Mule ESB, Mule Galaxy, Mule IDE and the MuleForge.

The Mule community edition will have major releases this quarter and another planned for the last quarter of this year and Ross presented the 2008 timeline.

Mule 2.0 has had a lot of architectural changes under the cover. More visible to the users will be schema-based configuration. There will be expression evaluation support [Xpath, XQuery, Groovy, Context information for routing, transformations, etc].

Mule Galaxy is a registry and runtime governance that is deeply integrated with the Mule ESB.

Mule IDE is Eclipse based.

Mule Enterprise 1.5 goes through an extensive QA, testing and platform certifications processes. It also includes MuleHQ that allows things like profiling, and Mule Saturn (beta) that allows visualization of the flow through Mule.

The community edition will have more frequent releases but will be potentially less stable.

Mule Enterprise 2.x will add some premium connectors, such as for Websphere MQ. Migration tools will be added to MuleHQ and Mule Saturn. The migration tools include even easier migration from Mule 1.x. One major change in 2.x is the addition of SOA Runtime, hot deployment of components. When one has a service running in Mule, and one changes the message format for a long running transaction, hot deployment allows a way to gracefully change over from the older to the newer format, without shutting down.

Mule Galaxy Enterprise provides for Clustering, Microsoft Office Indexes, PDF indexes, Workflow, Replication/federation, Premium (task based) documentation and QA.

Ross provided a few use cases.

The Mule IDE (promised to be fully functional and stable by the end of the year) allows one to create, debug and deploy new instances of Mule, while using Mule Galaxy to share artifacts and design time policies. While developing in the Mule IDE, one can extend the functions of the instance by getting components from the MuleForge.

Within Mule Galaxy, is something called Mule netboot, which is essentially a bootstrap node for Mule. Mule HQ can discover these nodes, which can be configured to download its configuration from a Mule Galaxy URL. Mule netboot then starts up Mule ESB. This is much simpler than the current Mule patch manager method of deployment.

Monitoring Mule with MuleHQ provides triggers and alerts for things like error and load conditions. Mule Saturn provide more of a business view, while Mule Galaxy provides the runtime governance as to who/what is using the service and how.

Ross is now providing a tour of MuleForge. One strong aspect of MuleForge is that it allows folk to create a connector, for example, and then release & manage it through the MuleForge. There are also proposals for projects, so that one can seek help in creating, or at least in determining interest in, certain connectors or extensions for Mule.

There is a certification process for projects

1. Not Certified
2. Community Certified
3. Partner Certified
4. MuleSource Certified - MuleSource will support that connector directly as part of a paid subsciption

MuleSource is now doing targeted distributions from MuleForge, for example, a REST pack that allows for ATOM publication that provides not just a code bundle, but also instructions, descriptions and definitions on using the pack.

Conclusion

As noted in our pre-OSTT thoughts, and in some of our OSBC notes, that over there have been some holes in the open source offerings, most notably around governance. The release of Mule Galaxy will be filling this hole. From last year's MuleCon I had noticed that there was a dichotomy among the users after the training, some who embraced the XML editing for configuring Mule and others who missed their wizards. The schema-based configuration and the seamless integration of the Mule IDE should help to satisfy both camps.

Dave came back up to garner suggestions for the ending campground. The audience suggested:

1. .Net integration
2. EDI transformations and using the MuleForge
3. Dynamic transformations
4. performance and test authoring for the full life-cycle
5. migration from 1.x to 2.x
6. using the IDE
7. Internationalization
8. BPEL
9. use cases for Mule Galaxy including non-Jackrabbit, JBPM & Alfresco
10. clustering and high availability
11. Integrating various ESB/SOA/integration product lines and can Mule be used to bring a "one of everything" shop together