We regularly write about our technical experiences (good and bad) and what we're learning from the market.
Many organizations are adopting a microservices architecture in order to reduce dependencies between system components and allow more frequent release cycles and more flexible scalability. However, unless they have a clear view of the underlying interaction patterns, teams risk building a tightly coupled distributed monolith.
Continue readingDataWeave is the primary transformation language in Mule. What is interesting about DataWeave is that it brings together features of XSLT (mapping), SQL (joinBy, splitBy, orderBy, groupBy, distinctBy operators), Streaming, Functional Programming (use of functions in DataWeave code) to make it a power-packed data transformer. I am going to discuss some of the scenarios which will help developers solve some difficult problems using DataWeave. The three topics I would like to discuss here are:
Continue readingThe technical advancements in every aspect of software development lifecycle make it clear that there are more than one solution to any problem. In this article I examine Istio’s service mesh capabilities to address issues that developers face while creating microservices and compare it with the widely adopted Netflix frameworks. Istio takes away many of these microservices concerns from the developer and delegates them to operations where collective behaviours can be managed better.
Continue readingData retention has become a crucial topic over the past few years, with organisations continuously exploring better ways to define and implement secure processes that cater to their needs. This becomes increasingly difficult when most of our data is stored/generated in the cloud, hence, requiring a flexible and innovative approach towards managing our data assets.
Continue readingMicroservices have become popular as a way of eliminating hidden dependencies between software components and allowing fine-grained deployment without dragging along unneccessary context. In this way, microservices promote autonomy for agile development teams and allow an application to evolve more naturally and in some cases to develop faster.
Continue readingContainer orchestrators are the next big thing in the modern containerisation movement. And unless you have painted your career into a legacy corner, you will encounter these technologies sooner or later.
Continue readingIn a previous blog post, Rashmi showed us how to synchronise logs from CloudHub to an external logging system. This follows an increasing demand to utilise MuleSoft Anypoint CloudHub logs, events, and dashboard statistics as part of a broader monitoring strategy which aims to:
Continue readingOverview
Continue readingThe ability to control how Mule creates and manages spring application context is a very useful feature. On a recent client engagement, I had to perform an identical integration operation but from a variable number of sources (different for each environment).
Continue readingTo succeed in our modern world of API-led connectivity, we need to go back to basics… all the way back…
Continue readingThis is 2016. If you are still spending macro-efforts developing microservices, there is something seriously wrong. These days, there are plenty of tools and frameworks at the disposal of the discerning developer to rapidly build microservices.
Continue readingBlueprint is a dependency injection framework specification for OSGi, standardized by the OSGi Alliance group. Apache Aries is one of the several implementations of this spec.
Continue readingAs we dawdle till every facet of our lives are containerised, we still find ourselves in need of ways to automate provisioning of actual servers and operating systems. My current favourite way to do this is through Ansible.
Continue readingThe groovy script transformer component is a very powerful piece of Mule. I use it for almost every message transformation that I need to make. Its XML and JSON libraries reduce message format conversion down to little more than building a map, while closures give you some powerful processing tools for handling complex data structures.
Continue readingWith all the drag-and-drop goodness of AnyPoint Studio these days, it’s easy to forget that under the hood Mule ESB remains a very powerful, configurable and extendible framework. This power comes in handy when you’re faced with demanding file processing requirements in advance of Mule’s out-of-the-box functionality.
Continue readingIf you followed my previous rambling, you might feel like we are due for some hands-on Dockering. So let’s get technical!
Continue readingDocker has just turned two and it has been a heck of a two years. Looking back, describing its rise as meteoric now seems like such a misnomer as there is no sign of slowing down.
Continue readingOn a recent client engagement we adopted SOAP over HTTP as our preferred communication channel for Web Service consumers. Since the transport protocol was HTTP, our next requirement was to setup HTTP Basic Authentication and role-based authorization. We tend to prefer simpler transport-level authentication over WS-Security which is overkill for most situations.
Continue readingRecently we’ve been writing quite a few ‘bulk’ APIs - where consumers don’t want a single resource, or a screenful of search results but instead need (close to) the entire record set. In this blog we discuss several features of the Mule ESB platform that make is easy to design and implement bulk APIs over a variety of back-end technologies.
Continue readingThis is an introduction to the Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) stack and how we have used it to capture, store and visualise application logs.
Continue readingIn almost every integration project in existence, you’ll find that at some point you need to map one set of representative values to another. It doesn’t take long to think of a few common examples. Lets take two hypothetical systems named Xup and Yonder. How do they each represent countries in addresses?
Continue readingWhile working for one particular client we were under the particular constraint of not having access to the JMS management console (in this instance the ActiveMQ Console). So when it came time to test out integration workflows we needed a quick and easy way to call the SOAP over JMS services. The Deloitte Platform Engineering folks are well versed in their Groovy scripting and came up with this awesome Groovy script:
Continue readingHere at Deloitte Platform Engineering Continuous Delivery has become a central part of the way we work. Naturally, we were very excited by the news that ThoughtWorks – who introduced Continuous Delivery (CD) to the world – have recently open-sourced their CD server software ‘Go’.
Continue readingI recently used Mule ESB with Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS) as the supporting messaging infrastructure. Whilst I was able to achieve a reliable outcome that satisfied all requirements, there are a number of aspects of SQS that make it different to the typical JMS-based messaging system. In this post I’ll cover these key points of difference and walk through an example of a robust and reliable Mule flow that can be applied to a range of common integration scenarios.
Continue readingA handy addition in XSLT 2.0 is a nice set of date and time format XPath functions. XSLT 1.0 was decidedly lacking in these functions, so you may have used a third-party library such as EXSLT for this purpose. EXSLT offers arithmetic functions on dates and times (still absent in XSLT 2.0) but the XSLT 2.0 offering is perfect for formatting dates and times as strings. It also means that you don't have to worry about importing the third-party library.
Continue readingPart 1 of this series layed the foundation for some Groovy concepts and what makes the language suitable for data mapping tasks. With that in mind, lets dive into some of the advanced mapping features and some real world samples.
Continue readingESB services involve working with a variety of different data formats and structures e.g. XML, JSON, CSV, spread sheets, key-value structures. Transformations between XML and other data structures are quite common when it comes to developing an ESB layer. Mule ESB provides a wide range of choices when it comes to scripting and data transformation. There’s enough choice to satisfy the proclivities of any developer.
Continue readingRecently we helped a client deploy an on-premises ESB platform based on Mule ESB and Apache ActiveMQ. The platform uses JMS queues between ESB services and adapters to provide load balancing and fault tolerance across active/active Mule servers.
Continue reading