Random Learnings by Ralph Palomar

Mule is an integration software I have tried to learn recently. It has an Eclipse-based development environment, and since my work experience is mostly about integration, I kind of felt that I would not have a hard time learning the software. Its development environment Mule Studio offers two approaches to develop the integration code: using the visual editor and the XML editor. With the visual editor, you can drag and drop configurable resources; each of which has a specific function. The XML editor offers a convenient way for developers to modify configurations without opening Mule Studio. Mule is quite reminiscent of TIBCO BusinessWorks, but one of its apparent strengths is that it offers a variety of out of the box functions for integrating with other platforms without using adapters or custom code. Well, I have tried my luck and developed my first Mule project. Upon creating a new project, all the necessary folders and configuration files are automatically added to the project. T...

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software design principle which allows an application to be exposed as an independent service that can be accessed and reused by one or more applications. Two applications interact through an interface which defines the message exchange pattern and the service contract in order to establish communication successfully between them. It is a great concept that separates implementation logic from the data definitions and allows modularity of programs that can be treated as “silos”--which means they can be developed separately at the same time without any dependencies. More of it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture . Service orchestration is a concept closely related to SOA which allows services to be arranged and organized into workflows. It enables independent services to interact and talk to each other to achieve an automated end-to-end process. It is often compared to an orchestra in which different musical instrum...