We have received a great early response so far to our recent release of Mule MQ, MuleSoft’s new JMS messaging server.  The response is not unexpected, since the Mule ESB user base has been requesting that we provide a JMS server which has been tested and is supported along with Mule ESB.  Hundreds of organizations have downloaded Mule MQ for evaluation and we have been hearing great feedback from the Mule community.

Some people have been very interested in the performance of Mule MQ, and they have asked us to provide more details about the tests we have run to validate performance. It’s clear that performance is one of the most important criteria for selecting a JMS messaging product, so our product team spent a great deal of time benchmarking Mule MQ against the most popular JMS products currently available.

One of the projects we selected for comparison was Apache ActiveMQ (most product vendors prohibit publishing benchmark data). ActiveMQ is the leading open source JMS technology, and is popular with the Mule community. For that reason, we wanted to understand how Mule MQ would compare ActiveMQ under some common scenarios.

A few things that we considered as we designed our tests:

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Apache Tomcat is the perfect application server for deploying your web applications in production. In fact, it also happens to be the only Java application server that has hardening guidelines published by Center for Internet Security (CIS). CIS publishes hardening guidelines for widely used software to help enterprises protect their deployments. The very fact that they have hardening guidelines for Tomcat is a testament to its widespread popularity and usage.

So, how do you know if your Tomcat installation is secure? Its actually very easy. I will provide step-by-step instructions on evaluating whether your Tomcat is secure. If you find that you need to make changes, you can use Tcat Server to harden your Tomcat instance.
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The new stable release of Tomcat 6.0.24 represents six months of open source software development. Version 6.0.24 includes a small number of new features, plus a large amount of important bug fixes and enhancements. This release is an incremental bug fix release, but the number of fixes included in this release is high. (more…)

MuleSoft just announced availability of Mule MQ.

Seriously! Do we really need another messaging server in this already crowded market? Then again, do we really need Google Nexus One and Motorola Droid when Apple’s iPhone supposedly already has almost everything one could ask for? The answer lies in the user’s need for reliability, performance, interoperability, and ease of use – in short, the answer is YES. (more…)

While we like to believe that our application servers and web applications are flawless, the reality is that applications have bugs. Sometimes, they have nasty bugs, such as holding onto references and thus causing larger memory consumption over time. As a result, many IT operations have put in place processes to restart the application servers and web applications on a periodic basis. Some have written scripts to do this, and some rely on an administrator to wake up in the middle of the night to login remotely to the server and do the restarts. Even if you have flawless web applications, you still need to restart your application server as a result of configuration changes and/or to deploy new versions of your web applications. (more…)

ObjectWatch has put out a report titled The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity. They estimate that we are losing $500 billion per month in IT failures. That’s a scary number. If this rate of failure continues, business confidence in IT will diminish.

A couple of points in the report caught my eye, as they are applicable to the points we have been discussing over the last several months.

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