Integration is becoming such a critical part of application development that we spend many of our cycles on making Mule easier for any developer to use. Mule Studio was built to address the needs of developers who don’t wake up every morning thinking about integration.

If you have used Mule in the last year there is a good chance that you have used Mule Studio.  It is an Eclipsed based development environment for building Mule applications either visually or using the XML DSL (with full two-way editing).   Mule Studio has become the preferred on-ramp to working with Mule. Of course if you prefer to hack in a text editor Mule continues to embrace Maven for command-line development.

The number of downloads for Mule tripled this year thanks to Mule Studio and we’re getting a rising tide of requests to address two areas:

1. Support multiple versions of the Mule runtime so that developer can easily switch between them
2. Support for installing Studio as a set of Eclipse plug-ins (right now it ships as a complete Eclipse runtime)

Also when you download Mule Studio you have the option of downloading two versions; Community or Enterprise. While two versions makes sense for the Mule runtime, it unnecessarily complicates things for developer tooling.

In the next release, Mule 3.4, we are addressing each of these concerns by creating a single Mule Studio distribution that will allow you to update to the latest versions of Mule using the update site, switch between versions as well as switch between Mule Community and Mule Enterprise.  This means you’ll be able to download Mule Studio once and keep your Mule development environment up to date all through the Eclipse update site; no more having to download, unpack and install new runtimes or extensions.

We needed to make a decision on which Mule runtime should Studio be pre-loaded. We went with Mule Enterprise since that provides a more complete showcase of what you can do with Mule and Mule Enterprise is used as the runtime for CloudHub. There will be no licenses to deal with or feature timebombs, Mule Studio will be free development whether you are using Mule Community or Mule Enterprise. Also, we are going to make it very clear if you are using a Mule Enterprise feature.

Our goal is to simplify the experience of getting started and maintaining a Mule developer environment. We want to remove the need to download files directly and make everything available through the Eclipse update site including new Studio features, new extensions on MuleForge as well as the Mule runtimes.  We’ll be releasing a milestone for Mule 3.4 shortly and as always we’d love to get your feedback on your experience with our new single Mule Studio.

About Ross Mason

Ross Mason has written 86 post in this blog.

Prior to founding MuleSource, Ross Mason was Chief Executive Officer of SymphonySoft Limited, an EU-based company providing services and support for large-scale integration projects. Previously, Mason was Lead Architect for RaboBank and played a key role in developing one of the first large-scale ESB implementations in 2002. Mason has also worked with NatWest Bank, Credit Suisse and UBS. Mason founded the open source Mule® project in 2003. Frustrated by integration "donkey work," Ross set out to create a new platform that emphasized ease of development and re-use of components. He started the Mule project to bring a modern approach, one of assembly, rather than repetitive coding, to developers worldwide. Mason holds a BS (Hons) in Computer Science from Bristol, UK.

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Related posts:

1. Webinar: Mule Studio – Integration Redefined
2. Mule Studio Gets New Flow Refactoring

Filed under: Mule Studio, MuleSoft | Social tagging: announcement > CloudHub > Mule ESB > Mule Studio