One of the good things about Apache Tomcat is that it is world’s most efficient and effective application server for running web applications. Legacy Java EE application servers can be more trouble than they are worth due to their inherent complexity and feature bloat.

In January of this year, the Apache Software Foundation released, Tomcat 6.0.24 , which made major improvements in finding and preventing memory leaks in web applications.  Today the ASF released Tomcat 6.0.26, which is an improvement over 6.0.24. (If you are wondering what happened to 6.0.25, that release was deemed not suitable to be released).

Here are highlights of the changes that went into this release since 6.0.24:
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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…)

Launching Tcat Server was a new type of challenge for MuleSoft. How do we take something that everyone knows — Apache Tomcat – and differentiate it with the enterprise features that our customers were asking for?

We started with a set of principles that would help us deliver this value. These included: (more…)

This week is an exciting one at MuleSoft — we just announced our newest product, MuleSoft Tcat Server. Tcat Server is a new enterprise Tomcat server, which provides application provisioning and server management capabilities for Apache Tomcat. You can read the press release here. (more…)

In their annual 2009 Bossie Awards, InfoWorld once again named Mule ESB as the #1 open source ESB, in the “Best of Open Source Platforms and Middleware” category. (more…)

SAP users, rejoice! Our esteemed partners at Osaka Gas Information System Research Institute Co., Ltd (OGIS) in Japan have created the SAP transport for Mule 2, available for download from MuleForge.

Yuji Yamano, the project lead on the SAP transport, explained how it works:

“The SAP transport provides connectivity with SAP ERP 6.0. Users can send an XML message that is equivalent to a BAPI function request and receive an XML message that is equivalent to a BAPI function response. The transport uses RFC and BAPI calls via JCO (SAP Java Connector) provided by SAP.”

He went on to explain that since SAP is the market-leading ERP player, with a dominant deployment footprint in more than 120 countries globally, the SAP transport will enable countless IT organizations to now integrate their core SAP systems with other applications and services using the power and simplicity of Mule ESB. Most IT organizations have had to rely on expensive and heavyweight proprietary integration solutions or custom code to move data in and out of their SAP applications. With the new SAP transport, SAP users will see a dramatic improvement in the cost equation.

For more information, or to download and review the SAP transport, visit the SAP Transport home page.

I am speaking this afternoon at OSCON on Building Applications Across the Cloud and Enterprise Using Mule. SOA and virtualization play critical roles in enabling cloud computing and an ESB can help to bridge the chasm between traditional enterprise technologies and cloud-based infrastructure and services.

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Streaming enables efficient processing of large data objects such as files, documents, and records by streaming the data through Mule rather than reading the whole thing into memory. Streaming provides the following advantages:

• Allows services to consume very large messages in an efficient way
• Message payloads are not read into memory
• Simple routing rules based on message metadata are still possible
• You can combine streaming and non-streaming endpoints

Streaming Transports

The following Mule transports support streaming:

• CXF
• File (set the streaming attribute to true to access the File object directly)
• FTP
• HTTP and HTTPS
• Jetty and Jetty SSL
• Servlet
• SOAP
• TCP
• UDP
• VM

Streaming Transformers and Filters

Many Mule transformers and filters can read input streams, process the contents, and send them on. However, most of these do not process the stream in real time; instead, they read the stream, load it into memory, process it, and then send it on. Therefore, transformers and filters can become a bottleneck in your application if you regularly stream large files.

The following transformers and filters do support true streaming and process the data as streams without loading them into memory first:

• XSLT Transformer
• XmlToXMLStreamReader Transformer
• DomToOutputHandler transformer (if the incoming XML format is a SAXSource or XMLStreamReader)
• SXC filter

It’s been an exciting couple of months for MuleSource. We began the year with 2 blowout quarters behind us. Last week we announced that Mark Burton, the former executive vice president of Sales from MySQL has joined the MuleSource board of directors. Mark brings a wealth of sales operating experience from one of the most successful open source companies to date. Mark has an excellent understanding of the different sales dynamics an open source company faces and has an uncanny ability to communicate his ideas on sales operations and strategy that makes you wonder why you never thought of them yourself. (more…)

Its QCon time again in San Francisco. This is one of the conferences that I really enjoy and the line up for this year is looking better than ever.

On Thursday, I will be doing a panel discussion with Bob Lee, Rod Johnson and Geir Magnusson discussing “How does the Open Source trend in Java affect your design and development process”, which should be really interesting.

On Friday I am co-hosting a talk with Dan Diephouse about Bringing the enterprise to the web with Mule. Folks attending the Mule session on Friday at 2pm will get the option of a 27% discount (not quite sure how we got to that random number) for the excellent Open source ESBs in Action Book plus the chance to win some Mule training.

As always I’d love to meet any Mule users at the conference, just catch me after my sessions ping me on twitter or wait for me by the beer fridge