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If you develop applications, which consumes web services from other applications or integration platforms, debugging can often be very deflating. If you don't use the correct debugging tools, you don't see the generated SOAP messages which are delivered between the parties.A very useful tool is the Open Source SOAP monitoring tool from predic8. The tool does the same as the TCP monitor from Axis,

In the current issue of the Java Magazin I published a tutorial to develop loose coupled systems with Mule. The tutorial illustrates the usage of an Enterprise Service Bus in an airport domain, where different airport systems communicate with each other over the ESB. In the example I use a set of important Enterprise Integration Patterns and show how these patterns are implemented in Mule. Some

Some interesting news from the Open Source ESB Mule. The first milestone from the third version of Mule is out and comes with a major important feature: Hot DeploymentWhat is the meaning of hot deployment?Hot deployment is a process of deploying/redeploying service components without having restart your application container. This is very useful in a production environment when you have multiple

BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language and will be used to execute business processes. But there are other standards which can also be used to execute your business process. What about XPDL - XML Process Definition Language? Nevertheless, many BPM vendors adopt their workflow engine to BPEL in order to survive on the BPM market. It's a mistake. Most of the products provide a BPEL

I published a german on article on JAXCenter about data transformation in Service Oriented Architecture. When different applications talk to each other, you must find a suitable data format which all applications can interpret. For the most cases XML is the first choice, because there is a wide range of tool support and additional standards, like Schema Editors, XPath and the like.In this article

I published an article about the new Mule IDE in the current issue of the Eclipse Magazin. In the article I give an overview about Mule and how the IDE supports developers to model their Mule applications. The IDE provides the following features:Mule project wizardMule runtime configuration (you can define different Mule runtimes)Graphical Mule Configuration EditorStart your Mule Server from your

I recently informed myself about the (Sun) Glassfish J2EE server. I never took it as a serious competitor in the field, as I had the impression it is just a reference implementation that is from Sun... However, I had to change my opinion. In the recent years it seems, that the Glassfish community worked hard on their baby and currently it seems to be a solid competitor in the field.The Glassfish

There is now a new blog which takes his focus only on Mule, by providing technical tips, comments and breaking news around the Mule product line (ESB, Mule Galaxy,..). Blogger from this blog are only developers from Mule Source and members of the Mule Service Team, which means that you get the information from first hand. There are already posts, e.g. how to write custom transformers in Mule or

For anybody who doesn't know the Open Source ESB Mule, I can recommend the presentation from Ross Mason hold on the Java Polis conference. In this presentation Ross gives an overview about Mule, including the component architecture and new features in Mule 2. Other relevant topics are:Develop services in MuleDealing with web services in MuleException strategiesTransaction

Scalability, Performance, Fault Tolerance are classical non functional requirements when building enterprise applications. Setting up the application in a clustered environment is a very popular approach and is often used in practice.When building process based applications you usually deal with long and short running processes. For example a order process may take one week, whereas a save

Last week I joined the CEE-SET conference in Brno. On the conference I presented a paper written by Robert Thullner, Josef Schiefer and myself: We analyse the application of Open Source frameworks in implementing enterprise integration patterns. For that matter a series of scenarios was implemented with (combinations) of different frameworks like Apache Active MQ, Apache Camel, Apache Service Mix

REST ist an architectural style on how to let distributed applications communicate. It is considered as an alternative approach to XML:RPC or SOAP webservices. I generally like that Google Talks introduction to REST:I would also recommend additional resources to get a more complete picture on REST, check out this link.

The last couple of years major Open Source ESBs, including MuleSource and ServiceMix, have been expanded and are used in critical business solutions. Tijs Rademakers and Jos Dirksen offer a book which gives an overview about Open Source ESBs and which combination of Open Source technologies with ESBs are used. The main open source solutions covered in this book are Mule and ServiceMix. Therefore

Andreas Pieber and Jakob Spoerk wrote a thorough and very good thesis about software components and Java-based component frameworks. The authors introduce component-based software development, derive criteria to compare frameworks and eventually discuss OSGi, Spring, J2EE, SCA, and JBI on an individual basis and in connection with each other as some problems require the combination of several

In a recent series Jos Dirksen and Tijs Rademakers describe "pattern based development" on the basis of Open Source Middleware (ESBs). Specifically their first article describes how to implement and integrate applications using Mule and the second article gives a good introduction into the Java Business Integration standard (JBI) and the implementation ServiceMix plus a Message broker.

The combination of a process engine and an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is one interesting aspect of modern service oriented architectures (SOA). Both, an ESB and process engines provide similar concepts and software architects often have problems to find the right solution. Therefor I and Bernd Rücker wrote an article in the German Java Magazin about it. To have a practical showcase the

I've found an interesting article about Pattern Based Development with Mule. This article illustrates how you can implement the Enteprise Integration Patterns using Mule elements. All code examplex are based on Mule 2.

For our German speaking audience: in the current iX magazin Markus and I discuss the expectations on an ESB and the current status quo in the Open Source arena particularly focussing on Mule and the trinity Apache ActiveMQ, Camel and ServiceMix. As an example we show a support-process and analyse how the process-execution can be supported by integration middleware.Then we go into some details of

Dana Gardner has an interesting interview in his Briefings Direct podcast (transcript) talking about the Apache CXF project. Apache CXF is one of the leading "Open Source Service Framework", supporting a series of service protocols like SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA. Additionally CXF plays in the concert with Apache Camel, ServiceMix and ActiveMQ.I believe, that CXF is a great project

Mule from MuleSource is one of the most used Open Source ESB in actual integration projects. On March 31, Mulesource announced the final Mule 2 release, a popular Open Source ESB. This major release comes with some new features and architectural improvements. For this purpose I've written an article for all german audience interested in Mule, for the JAX Center. The article is available online