Introduction

A pattern is a generic solution to a generic problem that is likely to occur over and over again. Patterns, for the purpose of this article, form a language that system designers can use like recipes: “if you find this type of problem, then you can apply this type of solution”.

In the domain of applications integration, patterns are particularly helpful. Application integration is complex, it typically involves several different systems, developers with different backgrounds, different organizations, etc. As a result of that complexity, the problems to solve are many. The introduction of Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf [1] is an excellent coverage of patterns for application integration. We will refer extensively to EIP in this article.

(more…)

As you may have seen, a new Mule Financial Information eXchange (FIX) transport project was recently made available on the MuleForge. A big kudos to the project owner, Stephen Fenech, and the team at Ricston for making this project available.

FIX is a public domain protocol aimed at real-time electronic exchange of securities transactions in the Financial Services industry, and is considered to be a standard protocol for pre-trade communications and trade execution. The Mule FIX transport is based on QuickFIX/J – a full featured messaging engine for the FIX protocol that is a 100% Java open source implementation of the popular C++ QuickFIX engine. This transport allows users to read and write messages over FIX endpoints and have Mule ESB route, transform and filter messages accordingly. (more…)

SalesForce does a great job managing your customer information. It is easy to customize and use, and you do not have to worry or pay millions of dollars to maintain the software or hardware.

The valuable information locked in SalesForce may be required by a host of other applications in your enterprise like Order/Inventory Management, Finance/Accounting, Web Analytics, etc. For example, when a sales opportunity closes in SaleForce, ideally an invoice would be created automatically in your accounting/financial software, without someone having to re-key the information. Or, when a new user registers on your website, you would like the information to automatically populate SalesForce as a lead.

(more…)

One of the great things about working on Mule is hearing the amazing tales of what people are doing with it. I’ve heard Mule referred to as a “Swiss army knife of integration” because of its flexibility and number of supported service topologies and technologies. While some case studies are available online from large implementations, I am very interested in hearing about the smaller successes people have had using Mule. Regardless of the size of your project if you have a story you’d like to share about how you used Mule to solve a problem, please do so by commenting on this post. You may just enlighten another Mule user to try the same, encourage a Mule developer to add a new feature or even spur a new MuleForge project.

I would also like to follow up with a few of the submissions in a one-on-one podcast so everyone can learn more.