In the previous installment of the Beyond Integration series, we talked about some strategies for evolving legacy monolithic systems into finer grained services orchestrated by Mule ESB. As mentioned in this earlier post, following such a path opens the door for implementing new business operations by using the newly created services in novel and previously impossible ways.

One of the main concerns of modernizing legacy application consists in reducing coupling in all its forms. This is why reducing systems and components coupling, by establishing cleaner and clearer interfaces, is often one of the very first steps taken in such an evolution process. Another form of coupling that needs to be taken care of is temporal coupling. Systems that tended to synchronously depend on each other are time-decoupled by the introduction of a messaging intermediation tier, leading to an overall architecture that scales better and is more resilient to failures.

In essence, reducing time-coupling generally translates into evolving from an invocation-driven architecture to an event-driven architecture. In today’s post, I will present how using Mule can be an enabling first step towards the roll-out of such an architecture.

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We have put up a screencast that shows you how to get started with RESTx, our platform for the rapid, easy creation of RESTful web services.

RESTx allows developers to contribute data access, integration and processing components in Java or Python, using a very simple API. Then, with nothing more than a browser and a simple HTML form, users provide parameters for those components, which the RESTx server uses to create new RESTful web services, resulting in easy to use, safe URIs that give users access to the data they need. For example, a developer may contribute a component for access to the API of a legacy application, but the users now provide different sets of query parameters, resulting in resources such as ‘customer list’, ‘order queue’, etc. (more…)