My prior experiences with heavyweight Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) had me running away screaming, and ready to join the nascent NoESB movement. But I recently started a new project with broad integration requirements, and point-to-point solutions wouldn’t cut it.

This time, I went after a lightweight, embeddable solution. After ruling out lesser alternatives, I settled on Mule ESB (aka, Anypoint Platform). I downloaded Anypoint Studio and runtimes, worked through Mule in Action, and started building my adapter platform. I found it easy to integrate Mule with my other Java EE stuff and extend it as needed. Mule flows and Mule Expression Language (MEL) took a little getting used to, but I found them rich enough for much of what I needed, with supporting services and Java components filling the gaps. The GUI flow editors are nice, but direct XML editing was faster.

I ran into some problems with new message processors introduced with 3.5, such as the Web Service Consumer and generic Database connector, but their predecessors (HTTPS and JDBC connectors) worked fine. The new DataMapper is nice, but I avoided components that require the enterprise (vs community) edition. Through various flows, I was able to quickly integrate services (SOAP and REST), databases (mostly DB2), queues (WebSphere MQ and ActiveMQ), files, and various other endpoints on servers and mainframes.

If you need to quickly implement many decoupled enterprise integration patterns with SEDA benefits, I recommend MuleESB.