We’ve been busy working on Mule releases recently, so this blog hasn’t had as much developer voice as it deserves. Working on things like WebSphere MQ can be demanding, which is another reason to appreciate the all-new shiny WebSphere MQ connector in Mule Enterprise 2.2.1. Makes one’s life much much easier.

That is not to say we didn’t cure our (and your) itch for new features. Many great ideas are currently being born, killed and re-born again, and I’m happy to announce an official user-facing kick-off of Mule 3.x (yes, it’s our third one already!) with the availability of the bleeding-edge 3.0 Milestone 1 Build.

Many features in this build aren’t obvious on the surface, like our massive private Bamboo infrastructure behind the firewall – an Octopus would be a more precise name for this highly distributed build monster, and it’s spawning more and more offspring, OMG! . But although the build may look the same at first glance, there’s a subtle twist. A hot one, or more precisely, a hot-deployment one!

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A couple of months ago, I reviewed the process for deploying Mule Galaxy, our SOA governance platform, onto Amazon’s EC2. Not long after that, I was introduced to cloudtools, a set of tools for deploying, managing, and testing Java EE applications on EC2. With these tools, it becomes trivial to deploy an application like Mule Galaxy to the cloud in minutes, rather than hours. (more…)

The Galaxy team is happy to announce the availability of the 1.5.2 release. This release provides several improvements:

• Support for Mule 2.2
• Policy enforcement now occurs correctly when metadata changes and lifecycle transitions occur
• Policies can now be applied to Entries
• Metadata properties can now be deleted via the API
• Performance improvements
• Dependency/link searches now work correctly
• The default version of entries can now be set without an error being thrown
• The Galaxy Enterprise database configuration tool now works correctly on Windows

For more information, please read the release notes and download page. As always, we’re anxious to hear your feedback via the mailing list or comments below.

We have been running Galaxy successfully on our in-house servers and laptops for demo purposes for some time now and decided that having a running image of Galaxy on Amazon’s EC2 was the next logical step. Galaxy in the cloud gives us the opportunity to expose a running instance to a much wider audience than might otherwise interact directly with the product. (more…)

I recently wrote an article that appeared in eBizQ on the topic of SOA governance. In this article, I argue that the primary reason that many pundits have declared “SOA is dead” is that the traditional “top-down” approach to SOA and governance have failed. Vendors have for too long evangelized a “big bang” re-architecture of development processes, using their tools to enforce new behaviors from developers, in order to realize the benefits of SOA. These approaches have failed because they make the average developer’s life more difficult, rather than simpler. Development teams, already stretched for time and resources, are generally reluctant to do extra work in the pursuit of some abstract notion of “service reuse.” Instead, modern governance approaches that are getting traction today actually help developers by integrating with existing tools and streamlining, rather than obstructing, familiar processes. (more…)

Hot on the heals of the Mule 2.1.2 release, we’ve pushed out a new release of Galaxy as well. This release contains many improvements:

• A new custom policy example
• A new AtomPub API usage example
• Fixed LDAP Integration
• Many bug fixes!

I just got back from QCon in San Francisco. QCon is one of the best conferences around (IMHO). The speakers are great, the content quality is excellent, and the hallway conversations are thought provoking. If only I could’ve attended more! (more…)

Galaxy includes many standard events you can use right out of the box, such as ENTRY_CREATED and LIFECYCLE_TRANSITION. (For the full list, click here). Using the Event API, you can also create your own events and create scripts that listen for them.

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You may have noticed a lot of changes to the MuleSource documentation wiki lately. With the help of all of our great developers, I’ve been slowly updating the pages, validating content, updating outdated information, and restructuring. We’ve also added a lot of new content to the Getting Started guide and set up navigation so that it flows like a book, making it easier for new users to get up and running. (more…)