Introduction To Mulesoft ESB

What is Mule ESB?

Mule, the runtime engine of Anypoint Platform, is a lightweight Java-based enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration platform that allows developers to connect applications together quickly and easily, enabling them to exchange data.

Mule has powerful capabilities that include:

• Service creation and hosting — expose and host reusable services, using the ESB as a lightweight service container
• Service mediation — shield services from message formats and protocols, separate business logic from messaging, and enable location-independent service calls
• Message routing — route, filter, aggregate, and re-sequence messages based on content and rules
• Data transformation — exchange data across varying formats and transport protocols

Mule provides many advantages over competitors, including:

• Mule components can be any type you want. You can easily integrate anything from a "plain old Java object" (POJO) to a component from another framework.
• Mule and the ESB model enable significant component reuse. Unlike other frameworks, Mule allows you to use your existing components without any changes. Components do not require any Mule-specific code to run in Mule, and there is no programmatic API required. The business logic is kept completely separate from the messaging logic.
• Messages can be in any format from SOAP to binary image files. Mule does not force any design constraints on the architect, such as XML messaging or WSDL service contracts.
• You can deploy Mule in a variety of topologies, not just ESB. Because it is lightweight and embeddable, Mule can dramatically decrease time to market and increases productivity for projects to provide secure, scalable applications that are adaptive to change and can scale up or down as needed.
• Mule's stage event-driven architecture (SEDA) makes it highly scalable. A major financial services company processes billions of transactions per day with Mule across thousands of Mule servers in a highly distributed environment.

Anypoint studio (IDE) for Mulesoft and Mule Runtime can be setup from this link https://docs.mulesoft.com/mule-user-guide/v/3.8/downloading-and-starting-mule-esb

To develop and test the mule projects we just require Anypoint studio, download and unzip to your directory. You can launch the Mule studio by executing AnypointStudio.exe file.

Note: Java 7 or 8 should be available in your system.

To create a new project Choose File-->New-->Mule Project , provide appropriate name and then click Finish. 

Below is created helloworld project,

Based on the concept of Event Driven Architecture (EDA), Mule works by responding to messages initiated by external resources (i.e. events).  Mule applications usually contain multiple linked flows and/or batch jobs, which, in combination, perform the integration required for your use case.

Flows are sequences of message-processing events. A message that enters a flow may pass through a wide variety of processors. In the example diagram below, Mule receives the message through a request-response inbound endpoint, transforms the content into a new format, and processes the business logic in a component before returning a response via the message source.