Open Source Solutions

The community has been brought together for the final campground session. Rather than sing kumbaya, we've been teased with t-shirts, toys and books from O'Reilly and being treated to a demo of a hot deployment by Travis Carlson. 'Tis all drag-and-drop goodness, with dragging jar files (bundles) as connectors and apps from a MacOSX Finder into Mule and watching the results in Terminal.app. Ohhh! Ahhh! Safaris shows Mule saying "Hello Travis, welcome to MuleCon" OK, I'll admit that this is pretty neat and should satisfy the most addicted user of Tibco wizards. This won't appear in Mule Enterprise Edition until after the 2008Q3 release of Mule EE 2.0.

One little aside… I was talking to an ex-TIBCO employee who said that as old as TIBCO is (grew out of a Teknecron business that was founded in 1985 and became an independent business in 1997), the user even only draws about 400 people. This is only the second MuleCon [there was a sort-of pre-MuleCon in 2006 at a bar in London, but let's not count it), which last year drew around 100 folk and this year brought in around 240. That's phenomenal growth and shows the excitement that good software can bring to its users.

Questions for the Campground from Day 1 and some new ones.

1. AMQP is an emerging messaging protocol and is platform independent. To answer the question about dot-Net integration with Mule, this is part of the answer.
2. BPEL & BPM? Workflow tools, such as JBPM, that don't depend on simple web services, work better with Mule. Travis has done some work with this including the JBPM plugin that is in the current distribution of Mule, and there is more on the Forge. Mule also works well with Oracle and Iona's solutions. Mule Services and Mule Events are complementary.
3. Mule is moving to Spring2, and has MuleSource thought about the exciting things that can be done with AOP in Spring2? Not so much yet, but it is among the next thing to look at. Mule Galaxy might be one of the first areas where MuleSource would leverage AOP to create runtime governance.
4. Can Mule Galaxy can be used to manage other artifacts? The short answer is yes.
5. How are folk clustering Mule? The typical way is to leverage an existing clustered app server. They are seeing more where the ESB has a state itself. They're looking at things like TerraCotta for such use cases.
6. Discussions of rules engines and routing, but much work to be done, hopefully through the MuleForge.

Dave gave some closing remarks and that's all 'til next year.