In May we made Mule Studio Beta publicly available, the graphical design tool for Mule ESB. This week we are releasing a new beta milestone, with a lot of fixes and improvements based on your feedback.
For this milestone we focused in two main areas, adding support for Mule functionality towards a complete Mule Studio by GA and easy of use.

Some of the new features in this milestone include:

• Support for Message Enricher
• Security SSL configuration support for  HTTP and SMTP
• 5 New Endpoints (Ajax, JDBC, SMTP, Quartz and SFTP)

 

The second area of focus is easy of use and productivity, some of the improvements includes:

• XML view code completion and auto-import of XML Schema
• Validation and tooltips for property dialogs

 

Completing Studio functionality

We added support for message enricher, which allows to easily enrich an incoming message with information that isn’t provided by the source system. A simple example of this is when the message from the source system contains a ZIP code but the target system needs the two letter state. In this case a message enricher can be used to lookup state using the ZIP code from an enrichment resource.   The enricher calls out to the enrichment resource with the current message (containing the zip code) then enriches the current message with the result.

 

We have introduced secure version of endpoints that use secure connections over SSL:

• HTTPS
• SMTPS

There are also several new endpoints including:

• Ajax: allows Mule events to be sent and received asynchronously to and from the web browser based applications
• JDBC: allows sending and receiving messages with a database using the JDBC protocol. Common usage includes retrieving, inserting, updating, and deleting database records, as well as invoking stored procedures (e.g., to create new tables dynamically).
• SMTP: allows sending email messages using an smtp server.
• Quartz: provides scheduling facilities with cron / interval definitions and allows Mule events to be scheduled/rescheduled.
• SFTP: SSH File Transfer Protocol. SFTP uses the Secure Shell (ie: SSH) protocol to encrypt all file transfer communications. SFTP is a bit more firewall friendly because it uses only 1 port and it’s also a bit more secure than FTPS.

Easy of use

In addition you all these new enhancements we also added better validation and documentation at the property level. So now when you are editing the properties of an endpoint and you are not sure what should go on each textfield, you can click the little blue “i” icon next to it and will show a tooltip with the description of that field.

Similarly, now if you try to enter invalid data, the validations will immediately kick in at the property level and show a red “x” on the left next to the text field.

Finally this release contains several enhancements to the XML view editor.

We added smart code completion and auto-import of XML schemas; If you prefer to directly edit the Mule configuration in the XML view, now you can press CTRL + Space to enable the auto-complete feature

It will not only auto complete Mule elements, but also provide a quick description next to each element.

If the XML schema has not been previously imported, the auto-complete feature will do it for you.

Auto complete also works for attributes, giving you context information of what attributes you can use inside each element.

What’s next?

We are planning to release a couple more milestones every 2/3 weeks with more functionality.

Among other things the next Milestone will allow updating Studio via the Eclipse updater mechanism, so there won’t be a need to download Mule Studio all over again.
There are many other features in Mule Studio for you to use including support for SOAP and RESTful Web Services, content-based routing, and deployment to Mule iON to name a few. I invite you to download it and give it a try. Remember Studio is free and anyone can use it.

Please help by reporting issues and feedback to the Mule Studio JIRA

If you would like to contact the team directly with questions feedback, please email us, or feel free to email me directly.

 

Related posts:

1. Mule Studio beta is here!
2. Mule Studio Beta is coming!
3. Mule Studio Webinar: May 19
4. Mule 3 Milestone 3 Released

Filed under: Mule ESB | Social tagging: ajax > Eclipse > FTPS > https > JDBC > Mule 3 > Mule Studio > Quartz > SMTPS