If you work in IT, you probably heard about IT service management (ITSM) or Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL is a set of best practices to improve IT effectiveness and quality, and it has gained wider adoption over the last several years. ITSM is at the heart of ITIL and aims to improve availability of IT services while reducing the cost of repeatable IT processes.

ITIL consists of several areas: Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Release Management, Change Management, Availability Management, Service Level Management, Capacity Management, Financial Management, and IT Service Continuity Management.

In this blog post, I will explore couple of areas and how you can use Tcat Server to gather supporting data for these process areas.

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Several years ago, I moved into Product Management, and progressively my time writing code has diminished. Hanging out with the super smart developers at MuleSoft has made me realize how much I missed the days of writing code. So I wanted to get back to doing some code, and what better way to do it than to write a few JSPs? JSPs are easy to write, and you get instant gratification as well.

I wrote a simple JSP that extracts data from an XML file, and it was working fine. When I showed it to the developers, they laughed and told me that I could make the code a lot simpler by using XPath. Sure enough, XPath looked easy enough to use, and I started refactoring my JSP. But during this process, I ran into a nasty bug. It seemed like once in a while, the JSP did not return forever. As any newbie developer would do, I immediately blamed the problem on the XML libraries I am using and started Googling for a solution. Unable to find a solution, I turned to Tcat Server to get diagnostic data. (more…)

There are use cases where you may want to send a message through HTTP, File, or another transport to a .NET Web Service. Using Mule ESB, it’s fairly straight-forward to accomplish this.

Consider this use case:
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It’s a very good thing that Tomcat is open source software. Because it is open, it enjoys broad stand-alone adoption, plus it has been incorporated as part of many other application server products, both commercial and open source. Why reinvent the wheel when Tomcat works great as a generic web container, and the source code is free? Many smart application server teams have chosen to embed Tomcat as their web container. They pull a copy of the Tomcat source code that they know works well, put it into their own source tree, and hook Tomcat’s Ant build system into their own, and rebuild Tomcat as part of their project. (more…)

Since the launch of the public beta of Tcat Server a few weeks ago, the team at MuleSoft has been busy working on adding new features to the product. We also launched a new product called Mule iBeans. To complement iBeans, we released public beta 2 of Tcat Server, which is now optimized as the ideal runtime for iBeans and contains several new features. Here are the highlights:

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I am very excited to announce that MuleSoft has launched a new open source integration product called iBeans (short for Integration Beans). iBeans provide a way to dramatically simplify common integration tasks for Web application developers.

Why did we create iBeans?

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I recently caught up with Ross Mason, co-founder and CTO of MuleSoft, to ask him about the launch of Mule iBeans, a new integration framework that allows your existing Java web applications to easily interact with other webapps and services, such as Twitter, Flickr, Gmail, and Amazon EC2.

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 Introducing Mule iBeans [3:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When I recently switched to Eclipse Galileo, I noticed that a Mule configuration file that had previously validated correctly now had validation errors. Since I did not change the file, something in Galileo’s validation of XML files must have changed.

The symptoms are these:

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At MuleSoft we use Agile development to build and deliver all of our software products. One of the more challenging and potentially time consuming part of agile is story estimating. Recently we decided to take a new approach to this that has proven to be a lot of fun and amazingly accurate. I call it Bubble Sort Estimation. (more…)

Some time ago I wanted to do a Mule demo. I’m a Jabber fan so I wanted to use the XMPP transport for the demo.

I soon found out that the XMPP transport in its current form doesn’t work with real world Jabber servers any more. SSL connections are negotiated through TLS now and authentication seems to involve SASL – two things that the outdated smack version we’re using for the XMPP transport cannot currently do.

So I decided to not only update the library but rather make the config of the transport more user friendly.

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