The Mule 3.6 release brought a comprehensive and very welcome refresh of XML capabilities, including cutting-edge XSLT support via the Saxon 9.6 HE library. Unfortunately one feature lost in this overhaul was Saxon’s easy mechanism for using Java methods as XSLT extension functions. Here’s how we made it easier to use...

The 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...

With 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.

If you followed my previous rambling, you might feel like we are due for some hands-on Dockering. So let’s get technical!

There are plenty of Docker “tutorials” out there. They show you step-by-step what to do, but I believe that, more often than not, they fail to tell you why. And by the time you finish these...

On 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...

Recently 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...

I 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...

For a recent Mule ESB project we needed to pump out a lot (100+) of ESB service operations. Most of them followed the same pattern: synchronous request-response to a single provider API. With so many similar flows to knock out, our thoughts quickly turned to ways to automate development. How much of our code could we...

Part 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.

Introducing GroovyMap

There are 3 data transformation scenarios which we commonly...

ESB 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...