The Lean Startups movement has produced several important and successful techniques that can yield benefits to all types of organizations. One of these is continuous deployment — a process in which all code written for an application is immediately deployed into production. The result is a dramatic reduction in the development cycle time and the freeing of individual initiative.  You can read about it here as described by Eric Ries.

Implementing the continuous deployment methodology can be difficult if you are developing Java EE applications, which come with inherent delays associated with the complexity of deployment and restart times for most Java EE servers. However, if you are using a lightweight, efficient application server such as Apache Tomcat, you have an advantage.

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In a recent post by Loraine Lawson on ITBusinessEdge, an informal survey was cited that referenced a majority of mid-market CIOs who “said they had no current business need for SOA.” I was a little surprised by the headline since MuleSoft continues to see tremendous adoption of our open source Mule ESB and subscriptions of our enterprise version among companies I would describe as mid-market. So, I decided to read further and try to learn more. (more…)

Recently, while working with Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, an opportunity came up for us at MuleSoft to take on open-source community work to improve the Ubuntu Tomcat 6 package. Having spent several years administering the most popular Tomcat Internet Relay Chat channel, I’ve gathered lots of feedback from Tomcat users about what they had difficulty with, and the changes I had to offer turned into implementation work.
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In early days of my career, Sun Microsystems was the company we all looked towards. No other company innovated as much in hardware and then in software as Sun Microsystems did. In fact, Apache Tomcat started as a project at Sun. I would have guessed in the early 90s that Sun would buy Oracle – oh well, how times change.

Oracle has a daunting task ahead of integrating some amazing technologies they acquired from Sun Microsystems. Several important and critical technology pieces such as MySQL, NetBeans, and the whole Java community need careful attention. It is only natural then that some other products might not get an equal amount of TLC from Oracle executives. (more…)

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…)

The move from big legacy Java EE application servers such as IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic to Apache Tomcat is accelerating, according to a recent Tomcat survey that MuleSoft drove in collaboration with Computerworld.

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Join us in booth 1833 (South Hall) at Oracle OpenWorld,  to experience firsthand the simplicity of MuleSoft Tcat Server and the enterprise-class features that make it “Tomcat with superpowers.”

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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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Silicon Valley Code Camp 2009 is coming up quickly. It will be held on October 3rd and 4th at Foothill College in Los Altos, CA. I attended last year and found the talks to be very informative and the attendees really engaged. It’s a great format, open to anyone and free to anyone who pre-registers. Last year there was a real mix of topics and this year they are introducing tracks to help guide attendees.

I decided to submit a session this year and will be talking about dead-simple integration for web app development. (more…)

Many of us have had to ponder this question. Technology selection is notoriously difficult in the enterprise space since the criteria and complexity of the problem is often not fully understood until later in the development process. (more…)