Although I am not always happy with the online documentation of the Mule ESB I found this article quite good. I have set up our configuration of Mule ESB implementation on several projects this way and it has proved to be working nicely. Although last time I got into the following issue. To use a datasource in my Mule3 project I had configured it like this in my Mule config file:

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<jdbc:oracle-data-source 
          name="jdbcDataSource" 
          user="${db.username}" 
          password="${db.password}" 
          host="${db.host}" 
          port="${db.port}" 
          sid="{db.sid}" />

However, when I deployed the application on my Mule instance I got the following XML parse exception:

org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: cvc-datatype-valid.1.2.1: ‘${db.port}’ is not a valid value for ‘integer’.

This is caused by the fact that the XML is validated against its XSD before the parameters are resolved. Although I found threads in several forums that described a solution for this issue I chose the following (pragmatic) solution. I decided to configure the datasource like this:

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<jdbc:oracle-data-source 
         name="jdbcDataSource" 
         user="${db.username}" 
         password="${db.password}" 
         url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@//${db.host}:${db.port}/${db.sid}" />

This way the XML validates fine against its XSD and during runtime the parameters are resolved.

As I wrote before it is quite easy to set up a web service proxy with Mule3. in this example I take it a step further and I describe how you can add WS-Security implementation to it. Although in the end this also is quite easy you have to make the correct configuration choices to get everything to work.

The first thing I had to do in my Mule config was to drop the pattern prefix. This took me a while to discover because I think this isn’t very clear in the documentation. Anyway, after that change it is fairly straight forward.
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In this post I show you how I setup a little test to see if and how easy I could manage to route the traffic to and from a web service through Mule ESB. The business case for this is an issue that one of our customers ran into when using web services. In a program hundreds of calls are done in a relative short period. Most of the time this isn’t a problem but sometimes vague issues occur. To get a better insight in this issue I want to put Mule in the middle so I can log the request and response and hopefully get a better idea about what is sent across the line. This is called the Web Service Proxy pattern and is commonly used to validate and audit the web service calls. For more background info about this pattern see this article.
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I got triggered by my previous post to create a process with which I could keep two instances of WordPress in sync. I wanted to see if I could do this with Mule. I came up with the following solution:

  • Receive the RSS feed of a new post in Mule flow
  • Use the content of the RSS feed to post to the other wordpress instance by using XML-RPC
  • Have it running on Mule iON so I don’t have to setup my own Muleserver

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Last week I migrated our site and blog to the Cloud. I got triggered by this article. That in the combination with the free account at Amazon’s EC2 was enough for me give it a try. (more…)

Like I posted before Mulesoft has released a new platform: iPAAS. I just went through the starters guide and I am pretty impressed. Of course the use case in the tutorial is very simple but the whole idea of just putting your Mule config into the cloud and it runs sounds good. And I have seen it working (you can check for yourself by submitting text to this url. (more…)

Mulesoft recently released some new products, totally different from each other but both very welcome.
The first one is MuleStudio. Mule Studio is an Eclipse-based developer tool, that allows to graphically create and test Mule ESB Flows. It is currently in beta but I think it might be a good reason to go back to Eclipse. Last few years I have been using Netbeans for my Mule/Java development because I liked the combination between Netbeans and Maven better.

The other ‘product’ that is released is Mule iON. I think a graphical development tool is nice to have but this iON thing is something that can really become big. It makes you use the cloud as the platform for your integration software. They call it the iPAAS (Integration Platform as a Service).

The coming days I will have a look at both and posts my findings here so stay tuned!

As promised I’m going to show a test case for which I have used Citrus to implement it. The case is like this:
In a predefined folder on a machine a character-separated file is placed. This file is picked up by our Mule ESB application. The content is transformed to XML and this XML document is posted to another application over HTTP. This application responds with XML document telling the document was processed correctly.
To test this interface with Citrus we have to perform the following steps:

  1. Copy the input test-file to the predefined folder so it is picked up by the test instance of our Mule ESB

    2. Our Mule ESB will poll a directory each second to check if there is placed a new file to process. Our test case starts by having Citrus putting a test file in the directory .

  2. Have Citrus listen on a predefined HTTP port to receive the XML message over HTTP

    3. Inside our Mule ESB the file is transformed to XML message and posted on a HTTP port to be processed by the ‘ORDER’ system. We have configured Citrus to listen on this specific HTTP port to pick up the XML message.

  3. Reply to the received message with a predefined XML message

    4. This steps mimics the ‘ORDER’ system as it would normally process the incoming XML message and respond with another XML message. In this case Citrus will send back a predefined XML message as response.

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Recently, I ran into an open-source test framework called Citrus. Citrus supports you in testing message interfaces in enterprise applications. Manual testing effort as well as coding mocks and simulators are not necessary. Instead Citrus enables integration testing in an automated way with out-of-the-box simulation of various message transports. We’ll use it to test our Mule based ESB.

Mule, of course, offers great possibility to unit test your application. And we also have a test setup which ‘talks’ to other applications. What we didn’t have was a testing environment which we could use to test the ESB as a blackbox without being dependent on other (external) applications. And this is exactly where Citrus comes in. Citrus makes it possible to test the complete lifecycle of a message flow without being dependent of other systems, actually with Citrus you proxy these dependencies.
In this post I will provide details and tips on how to setup and use Citrus. Although the documentation that is available is easy to read, it is not complete. It took me quite some effort to get it all running but like I said before the benefits of this framework are huge.
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We use a fair lot of XSLT transformations in our projects. Since making XSLT stylesheets is a tedious and error-prone job, we use Altova MapForce to do the job. MapForce is very versatile, but can not always cope with the requirements our customers come up with. This time, the customer asked us to implement some sort of maintainable translation mechanism. This mechanism should be able to translate incoming values using a user maintainable collection of values. This way, the transformation process does not need to be changed if a translation is added or updated.

Adding a (hardcoded) parameterized XSLT template is not an option, because this is not maintainable without changing the stylesheet. The answer? XSLT Java extensions!

In this blog I’ll show you a simple example on how to use Java extensions in a XSLT 2.0 stylesheet.

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