Think you know DataMapper? Think again! Let me share seven little tricks and tools that will help develop faster with DataMapper.

1. Using Flows as Lookup Tables

Let’s say you need to map and transform a message payload from one structure and format to another. Of course, DataMapper is the perfect tool for that job.  However, what if you also need to add to the payload as it is transformed and mapped? You could use DataMapper and a lookup table (CSV, DB or User Defined) to find and add data to a message, or you could take advantage of a new feature in 3.4: the Flow Reference Lookup. With this feature, you can use a flow reference to invoke a separate flow to request, process or retrieve information and use it in the mapping.

One of the examples that comes bundled with Studio demonstrates the flow ref lookup functionality perfectly. You can read the full example details, but to keep things short and sweet, I’ll explain an abridged version of how it was built here.

We’ll be modifying the DataMapper with FlowRef Lookup example by deleting the FlowRef inside the DataMapper to create it from scratch and illustrate how easy it is to use.

Use Case: A company needs to upload contacts in a CSV file to Salesforce. Not only do all the contact fields need to be transformed and mapped from CSV to Salesforce, we need to figure out how to convert the value of “state” in the CSV to “region” in Salesforce.

To meet these objectives, we’re going to use a DataMapper and a FlowRef Lookup table to access another flow with a Groovy script which uses the value of “State” to determine “Region”.

Step 1: We already have two flows: one with a File endpoint, a Logger, a DataMapper and a Salesforce connector, and a second one with a Groovy script element and a Logger.  The Groovy script can accept a value for “state”, figure out in which region the state belongs, and return a value for “region”.

Step 2: We configured a FlowRef Lookup Table in the DataMapper. Delete the mappings and follow along to create your own: in the Input pane of the DataMapper console, right-click Lookup Tables > Add FlowRef Lookup Table.

Step 3: Enter a value for the name of the FlowRef Lookup table, then use the drop-down to select the Flow Name which we must reference to look up information; in this case, it’s the LookUpSalesRegionFlow (see image below, left).  Use the “+” icon to add an input Name and Type (state, string), and an output Name and Type (region, string). Click OK to save your lookup configurations.

Step 4: From the Input panel of the DataMapper console, drag and drop the “region” field from the FlowRef Lookup table to the “Region__c” field in the Output panel. In the Lookup assignment dialog that appears, use the drop-down in the Expression field for “state”, then click OK to complete the mapping.

The result is a mapping that looks like this:

Save, run, enjoy!

2. Using MEL to invoke Java functions

You may already know that you have the option of using one of two expression languages in DataMapper: Mule Expression Language (MEL)  or Clover Transformation Language (CTL). What you may not know is that you can invoke Java functions using MEL.

Step 1: When you create a new mapping, DataMapper utilizes MEL by default. If you have previously changed your Default Script Type to CTL, you can change it back to MEL in the Mule Studio Preferences (Mule Studio > Preferences).

Step 2: Create any mapping you want, then click “Script” (upper right corner of the DataMapper console) to view the script of the mapping which looks something like this:  “output.name = input.name”.

Step 3: Click to set your cursor just after “input.name” then add “.toLowerCase()” . This modification invokes a Java function to change the input name to lowercase. See example below.

TIP!  Did you know you can also use auto-complete to invoke a Java function? Set your cursor at the end of “input.name” then hit “Ctrl + Space Bar” to display a list of auto-complete options.

3. Streaming large files through DataMapper

 Streaming! Yes, you can! Stream extra large files through DataMapper without consuming tons of memory.  Let me illustrate with an example.

The HTTP endpoint accepts a message – a large file – which it passes into a DataMapper. Passing through a Logger, the message then reaches a Foreach which wraps a Database endpoint. DataMapper must create “iteratable” objects from the file and so that the Foreach can process the items iteratively and push them into the database. In order to manage the processing of this large file, you can enable streaming on DataMapper.

Step 1: To enable streaming, click to open the DataMapper Properties (upper right hand corner of the DataMapper console).

Step 2: Check the box to enable streaming.

Step 3: Save and start streaming!

4. Viewing sample mapping values

Ever wished you could see an example of the values you’re mapping?  Your wish has come true! If you used an input file example to define your input fields, DataMapper automatically detects the information in the file and uses it to show you sample values for each field.

For example, for my mapping input, I created a CSV file which contained the following information:

company_name, company_address, company_city, company_city,company_state,company_zip

Universal Exports, 55 Main Street, Miami, fl, 33126

I added a DataMapper to my flow and used the example CSV file to define the input fields. Because the example CSV contains values for each field, DataMapper displays sample values for each field to make mapping more intuitive.

5. Handling Mapping Metadata

At times, you may need change some fields and re-create the mapping accordingly. DataMapper has a “magic” tool to make this happen.

Click the “magic wand” icon in the upper left-hand corner of the Input panel to display the Metadata Handling tools.

Reload Metadata

Step 1: Right-click your main input mapping item (in the example above, “companies2”), and select Add field. Enter a name for your new field, use the drop-down to define the type, then click OK to save.

Step 2: Click the magic wand, then select Reload Metadata.

Step 3: Watch as DataMapper magically uploads a sample value for your new field. In such a case, the value is “null”. My example below has a new field for “has_given_contact_permission”.

Recreate Metadata

Step 1: Add an input field to your CSV.

Step 2: In your Input panel, click Re-Create Metadata. Browse to select your newly modified CSV example file, then click OK. The new field appears in the Input panel.

Recreate Metadata from Input

If you want to include the new field in the output, click the “magic wand” icon in the Output panel, then select Re-Create Metadata From Output to transfer all input fields  – including any new ones – to the output panel.

6. Propagating DataSense data

 Automatically import a Anypoint Connector’s data structure to DataMapper? Consider it done! Using DataSense, you can easily map data between connectors without the hassle of manually researching and defining the fields. Each connector sucks in the data structure from its respective SaaS, and a DataMapper dropped between them pulls in the metadata so you can configure input and output with a few clicks.

To demonstrate, I’ll map a Salesforce connector’s inout to another Salesforce connector’s output.

Step 1: Build a flow with two Salesforce Anypoint Connectors.

Step 2: Configure each Salesforce connector, testing the connectivity of each.  See Testing Connections for details.

Step 3: Drop a DataMapper between the Salesforce connectors.

Step 4: Double-click to open the DataMapper. DataSense has already populated the input and output configurations, pulled automatically from each connector.

Step 5: Click Finish, and witness all necessary input and output fields appear, ready for drag-and-drop mapping.

7. Mapping flat structures to tree structures

Last but not least, the joy of easily mapping flat structures to tree structures! To illustrate this activity, I’ll use the following XML as input:

 The goal is to produce the following output:

To achieve this goal, I created an XML-to-XML mapping, transforming them to XSD. DataMapper produced the following:

Step 1: To convert from flat to tree structure, I dragged-and-dropped the “phone1” input field to the “number” output field.

Step 2: I dragged-and-dropped “person:person” input element to the “phoneEntry:phoneEntry” output element. This created a new Element Mapping so that now we have two “person” > “phoneEntry” element mappings.

Step 3: I dragged-and-dropped the “phone2” input field to the “number” output field.  Checking the preview of the mapping, we see something like this:

Not exactly what I had hoped to achieve. To fix this, I adjusted the script in DataMapper.

Step 4: Go to the Script view (upper right-hand corner of the DataMapper console) and in both of the element mappings named “person” > “phoneEntry” change the script line “output.__parent_id = input.__parent_id;” to “output.__parent_id = input.__id;”

Et voilà!  Seven handy tricks to make your data mapping life easier!

About domeniconi

Nicolas Domeniconi has written 1 post in this blog.

QA Analyst

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2. Mule School: DataMapper Testing Mappings and POJO inputs
3. Webinar: Streamline Your Complex Integrations with DataMapper
4. Introducing Mule Studio 3.4 Early Preview

Filed under: Mule Studio, MuleSoft

Anyone that has used DevKit to write a Mule extension and then wanted to add it to Studio, may have notice that the extension will appear under the Cloud Connectors category in the palette. This is not a problem when the extension is actually a Cloud Connector, but is sort of a problem when it was something else (for example a component like the LDAP connector). This is not an issue anymore since DevKit 3.3.2, as you can now use the @Category annotation at class definition level (Connector or Module) to select under which category you want your extension to be listed in:

It is important to mention that:

• You can only add the connector to one of the existing Studio categories (this means you cannot define your own category)
• The values for name and description attributes of @Categoryneed to have specific values (please don’t be creative), as shown in the following list:
  • Endpoints: org.mule.tooling.category.endpoints
  • Scopes: org.mule.tooling.category.scopes
  • Components: org.mule.tooling.category.core
  • Transformers: org.mule.tooling.category.transformers
  • Filters: org.mule.tooling.category.filters
  • Flow Control: org.mule.tooling.category.flowControl
  • Error Handling: org.mule.tooling.ui.modules.core.exceptions
  • Cloud Connectors (DEFAULT): org.mule.tooling.category.cloudconnector
  • Miscellaneous: org.mule.tooling.ui.modules.core.miscellaneous
  • Security: org.mule.tooling.category.security

Too ‘meh’ to build the category annotation yourself? Just copy/paste from the following gist:

Hope this tip helps you place your Mule extensions under the right Studio category.

About Mariano Capurro

Mariano Capurro has written 10 post in this blog.

Mariano is a Director of Engineering with broad experience in J2EE development and particular interest in web based applications and relational database design using Oracle, MySQL, and MS-SQL Server.

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Filed under: Mule Studio | Social tagging: DevKit

The saying “if it doesn’t exist on the Internet, it doesn’t exist“¹ is reigning truer every day. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine most businesses without an e-commerce platform, let alone without a web presence at all. Since e-commerce is becoming the new standard, e-commerce performance needs to be at its best.

In this blog series, I have come up with several ways to ensure your company’s e-commerce performance success, including: avoiding unnecessary network load, reducing number of (internal) HTTP errors, improving backend performance, understanding your clients, ensuring scalability of e-commerce site and finally understanding sales results through conversion rate.

Our client TescaraHats (name changed for commercial reasons), a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats, decided to expand its market reach with an e-commerce site where its potential customers could choose, customize and order hats online. Since the company’s core competence is in delivering highly customized products, TescaraHats could not simply use an off-the-shelf e-commerce application. It needs a customization wizard so that customers can create a uniquely customized product.

When sales did not increase after the implementation of the e-commerce platform, TescaraHats learned quickly that there is much more to e-commerce than simply putting an e-commerce service online.

Is E-Commerce a Silver Bullet ?

When you start a new business you usually need, at least, two things: 1) to let people know about it and 2) to make sure your employees know how to sell the products. In the case of e-commerce, a lot of businesses initially focus on getting a high page ranking in Google search results, instead of actually selling the products. A common misconception about search engine optimization (SEO) is that people treat it as some kind of voodoo for which an external “shaman” has to be brought in. Moreover, some agencies that specialize in SEO rely too much on the importance of search results for B2B and do a poor job by focusing only on the short-term “hacking” of Google results by creating an enormous network of connected sites which route the traffic to their clients’ web site. Those companies who focus only on the external web of links might eventually suffer the wrath of Google that considers such practices as cheating and takes actions to downgrade or remove fallacious brand from search results;BMW and JCPenney are two examples that learned it the hard way.

What search engines like Google stress is that, just like in case of a brick and mortar location, loud marketing is only part of the story. The business should offer desired products and hire skilled, customer-focused sales people. According to Matt Cutts from Google applying black hat SEO techniques, such as link spamming, will less likely get your site to show up in search results in few months.

TescaraHats is a well-recognized brand and is known as THE customized hats manufacturer in Europe. The company believed that an e-commerce site would be an easy way to boost its sales. However, due to the poor e-commerce performance of the application, users were unhappy with their experiences and the application was not the silver bullet TescaraHats had hoped for.
E-commerce is your business online; therefore it is subject to “web rules.” As Jakob Nielsen writes in his report Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce: “You forget the web’s realities? You die.” According to this report, if users cannot navigate easily through an e-commerce site, the site will lose almost half (44%) of its potential sales. On average, users currently only succeed with their purchase 56% of the time. The report concludes: with better usability the average site could increase its current sales by 79%.

Understanding E-Commerce Performance

The usability of an e-commerce (and not only) site is a compilation of many factors; with application performance at the forefront.

The process of ordering a customized hat with TescaraHats e-commerce site consists of three steps (see Figure 1):

1. The customers choose a type of the hat.
2. They choose their size, color, add-ons, etc.
3. Eventually they complete their purchase by submitting the order form, proving shipping and payment details.

Figure 1. TescaraHats e-commerce workflow

TescaraHats was preparing for an influx of new orders when the company commenced its e-commerce site, but this was not the case.

Even simple reports from tools like Google Analytics could show that the problem was not getting users to visit the site, but rather getting customers to complete transactions.

In order to see the real reason behind low online sales the Marketing team also consulted the Operations team. The team used an APM tool that could analyze the performance of the data center and application, and show how well the e-commerce site performed depending on geographical location and browser type.

Figure 2 shows an overview report of performance of all major components. The configuration services (Configurator, Configurator hats) experience the worst performance, followed by the components responsible for completing the order (Shopping Cart, Login).

Figure 2. With the health status check report, the Operations Team can quickly determine which infrastructure components experience performance problems and which e-commerce operations are affected.

And What Now?

The TescaraHats use case shows that e-commerce sales results rely not only on pagerank but also on application performance and usability. Over the next 4 posts of this series we will demystify poor sales by looking at some aspects of improving usability of an e-commerce solution through application performance management. We will start with improving backend performance and go all the way to understanding conversion rate.

(This series is based on materials contributed by Pieter Jan Switten, Pieter Van Heck, and Paweł Brzoska based on original customer data. Some screens presented are customized while delivering the same value as out of the box reports.)

1. Kenneth Goldsmith, Presented at Elective Affinities Conference, University of Pennsylvania, September 27, 2005 ↩

With our new service platform and the convergence of dynaTrace PurePath Technology with the Gomez Performance Network, we are proud to offer an APMaaS solution that sets a higher bar for complete user experience management, with end-to-end monitoring technologies that include real-user, synthetic, third-party service monitoring, and business impact analysis.

To showcase the capabilities we used the free trial on our own about:performance blog as a demonstration platform. It is based on the popular WordPress technology which uses PHP and MySQL as its implementation stack. With only 4 steps we get full availability monitoring as well as visibility into every one of our visitors and can pinpoint any problem on our blog to problems in the browser (JavaScript, slow 3^rd party, …), the network (slow network connectivity, bloated website, ..) or the application itself (slow PHP code, inefficient MySQL access, …).

Before we get started, let’s have a look at the Compuware APMaaS architecture. In order to collect real user performance data all you need is to install a so called Agent on the Web and/or Application Server. The data gets sent in an optimized and secure way to the APMaaS Platform. Performance data is then analyzed through the APMaaS Web Portal with drilldown capabilities into the dynaTrace Client.

Compuware APMaaS is a secure service to monitor every single end user on your application end-to-end (browser to database)

4 Steps to setup APMaaS for our Blog powered by WordPress on PHP

From a high-level perspective, joining Compuware APMaaS and setting up your environment consists of four basic steps:

1. Sign up with Compuware for the Free Trial
2. Install the Compuware Agent on your Server
3. Restart your application
4. Analyze Data through the APMaaS Dashboards

In this article, we assume that you’ve successfully signed up, and will walk you through the actual setup steps to show how easy it is to get started.

After signing up with Compuware, the first sign of your new Compuware APMaaS environment will be an email notifying you that a new environment instance has been created:

Following the steps as explained in the Welcome Email to get started

While you can immediately take a peek into your brand new APMaaS account at this point, there’s not much to see: Before we can collect any data for you, you will have to finish the setup in your application by downloading and installing the agents.

After installation is complete and the Web Server is restarted the agents will start sending data to the APMaaS Platform – and with dynaTrace 5.5, this also includes the PHP agent which gives insight into what’s really going on in the PHP application!

Agent Overview shows us that we have both the Web Server and PHP Agent successfully loaded

Now we are ready to go!

For Ops & Business: Availability, Conversions, User Satisfaction

Through the APMaaS Web Portal, we start with some high level web dashboards that are also very useful for our Operations and Business colleagues. These show Availability, Conversion Rates as well as User Satisfaction and Error Rates. To show the integrated capabilities of the complete Compuware APM platform, Availability is measured using Synthetic Monitors that constantly check our blog while all of the other values are taken from real end user monitoring.

Operations View: Automatic Availability and Response Time Monitoring of our Blog

Business View: Real Time Visits, Conversions, User Satisfaction and Errors

For App Owners: Application and End User Performance Analysis

Through the dynaTrace client we get a richer view to the real end user data. The PHP agent we installed is a full equivalent to the dynaTrace Java and .NET agents, and features like the application overview together with our self-learning automatic baselining will just work the same way regardless of the server-side technology:

Application level details show us that we had a response time problem and that we currently have several unhappy end users

Before drilling down into the performance analytics, let’s have a quick look at the key user experience metrics such as where our blog users actually come from, the browsers they use, and whether their geographical location impacts user experience:

The UEM Key Metrics dashboards give us the key metrics of web analytics tools as well as tying it together with performance data. Visitors from remote locations are obviously impacted in their user experience

If you are responsible for User Experience and interested in some of our best practices I recommend checking our other UEM-related blog posts – for instance: What to do if A/B festing fails to improve conversions?

Going a bit deeper – What impacts End User Experience?

dynaTrace automatically detects important URLs as so-called “Business Transactions.” In our case we have different blog categories that visitors can click on. The following screenshot shows us that we automatically get dynamic baselines calculated for these identified business transaction:

Dynamic Baselining detect a significant violation of the baseline during a 4.5 hour period last night

Here we see that our overall response time for requests by category slowed down on May 12. Let’s investigate what happened here, and move to the transaction flow which visualizes PHP transactions from the browser to the database and maps infrastructure health data onto every tier that participated in these transactions:

The Transaction Flow shows us a lot of interesting points such as Errors that happen both in the browser and the WordPress instance. It also shows that we are heavy on 3rd party but good on server health

Since we are always striving to improve our users’ experience, the first troubling thing on this screen is that we see errors happening in browsers – maybe someone forgot to upload an image when posting a new blog entry? Let’s drill down to the Errors dashlet to see what’s happening here:

3rd Party Widgets throw JavaScript errors and with that impact end user experience.

Apparently, some of the third party widgets we have on the blog caused JavaScript errors for some users. Using the error message, we can investigate which widget causes the issue, and where it’s happening. We can also see which browsers, versions and devices this happens on to focus our optimization efforts. If you happen to rely on 3^rd party plugins you want to check the blog post You only control 1/3 of your Page Load Performance.

PHP Performance Deep Dive

We will analyze the performance problems on the PHP Server Side in a follow up blog. We will show you what the steps are to identify problematic PHP code. In our case it actually turned out to be a problematic plugin that helps us identify bad requests (requests from bots, …)

Conclusion and Next Steps

The intention of this blog was to show you how easy it is to setup your application with Compuware APMaaS and what it delivers – not only for Enterprise Applications that we typically write about but even for applications such as our WordPress blog. Stay tuned for more posts on this topic, or try Compuware APMaaS out yourself by signing up here for the free trial!

The mega-trends of SaaS, mobile and Big Data are converging, generating a new wave of business opportunity for enterprises. The convergence demands a new kind of platform – one that connects and takes advantage of the explosion of endpoints and data caused by organizations each choosing a uniquely diverse set of best-of-breed applications to power their business. In this live webinar, Ross Mason will discuss his vision for this new platform and demonstrate how MuleSoft’s solutions are making it a reality.

An on-demand link will be sent to all registrants after the webinar is over.

Reserve your spot now >>

Questions to be discussed include:

• How will SaaS and mobility impact my business?
• Is SOA really dead?
• Does my business need an API strategy? Where should we start?
• Can the Anypoint platform help me secure a competitive advantage?

Presenter: Ross Mason, Founder and VP Product Strategy, MuleSoft

Date: Thursday, May 16, 2013

Time: 8 AM PT / 11 PM ET / 4 PM GMT

Register Now>>

About Dan Ahmadi

Dan Ahmadi has written 5 post in this blog.

I’m a growth hacker, demand gen marketer, and quantitative geek with a passion for optimization and efficiency. There are few things I love more than a huge data set and some tools to crunch and present it. I studied biochemistry, molecular cell biology, and technology management at UC Davis.

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Filed under: APIhub, CloudHub, Mule ESB, MuleSoft

I’m thrilled to announce the availability of CloudHub in Europe. With this announcement, we’re extending the industry-leading CloudHub platform to address the needs of our European customers with dedicated computing resources located in the European Union.

European companies are adopting the cloud faster than ever — Salesforce recently announced that Europe was their fastest growing region last year. However, one of the primary obstacles to using cloud services in the EU is complying with the EU data protection directive which regulates the processing of personal data. With the availability of CloudHub in Europe, it’s now significantly easier for European organizations to comply with these regulations by ensuring data never leaves the EU.

Another challenge which European companies are facing is the latency of data travelling back and forth between the US and the EU. With CloudHub resources located in Europe, companies are able to access data more quickly and publish APIs under a new eu.cloudhub.io domain.

Please contact your MuleSoft representative to have the European region enabled for your CloudHub account today.

About Dan Diephouse

Dan Diephouse has written 19 post in this blog.

Product Manager, CloudHub

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Filed under: CloudHub

The Service Oriented Architecture stipulates a change in perspective for software purchase and development which traditionally limited itself to catering for the isolated needs of a department or sub-division of the Enterprise. SOA exploits emerging standards to facilitate the development and purchase of software so that the requirements of the Enterprise as a whole are satisfied. Thus, services are identified, defined and subsequently reused in orchestrations with other services that map to the processes which form the life arteries of the Business. SOA advises the use of a Service Registry to govern the initiative in order to ensure the proper re-use of existing candidate Services and their compliance to the policies of the Enterprise. That said, in recent times, with the explosion of APIs, the Enterprise has flung open its doors and windows and ripped off its roof in order to reach to the sky to exploit the vast array of cloud-based services on offer and include them in its software inventory. Thus, the New Enterprise has come of age and brought with it the need for a suitable form of Governance.  With Anypoint Service Registry, MuleSoft are the first to offer a cloud-based Governance solution which allows the New Enterprise to securely register, discover, manage and monitor its services as well as the consumers of those services. With this post, we’d like you to see for yourselves how Anypoint sets the standard for next generation SOA Governance.

From Architectural Principles to Business Goals

The Service Oriented Architecture represents an attempt to have software development more aligned to the strategic goals of the Business. It strives towards a greater Return on Investment and Organisational Agility while affording the Enterprise the luxury of mixing and matching solutions from different vendors due to a more natural Interoperability between their products, as well as reducing the IT work load. These goals are achieved by embracing best-practice Guidelines in the design of solution logic.  We wish to focus your attention on how Anypoint Service Registry collaborates with Mule Enterprise Service Bus to ensure that these Principles are consistently embraced for the success of your SOA architecture and hence the Business that it serves.

Service Discoverability

The New Enterprise needs to ensure rapid delivery of new orchestrations of existing IT resources to meet with its requirement for agility in response to changes in Business Process. To this end it is essential to ensure that as Services are developed, meta-information about their purposes, capabilities and limitations is stored in a centralised location and made easily accessible both to Service designers and to potential Service Consumers for reuse. With its Service Repository AnyPoint helps in this regard by cataloging Version Information, Interface and Message Schemas (e.g. WSDLs and XSDs), location Endpoints as well as Runtime Policies. Tags and Custom Taxonomies can also be applied to make search and discovery a lightening fast operation.

Service Loose Coupling

It is necessary that Services and their Consumers both evolve with minimum dependency on each other. Anypoint’s Service Virtualization feature enables the dynamic lookup of Endpoints by allowing Service Clients to locate the Services through an Endpoint registered on the Service Registry which it will resolve at runtime to a concrete Service Implementation. The criteria for this choice can be represented by meta-data associated with each Implementation Endpoint on Service Registry. Thus, the contract between Service and Consumer remains the same but the runtime behaviour of the Service varies dependent on meta-data present in the service calls. The criteria can cover geographic region for example, or SLAs, language or customer category. Updating endpoint meta-data for your Services in Anypoint has no impact on the consuming Applications much less on the Services themselves.

Service Standardisation

Just as the Standardisation of Service Interface and Message definitions results in a natural interoperability between Services in a SOA Architecture because they all, as it were, speak the same language, it also produces a set of Services whose functionality is clearly understood for potential reuse. A Service defined on Anypoint can have any number of descriptive artifacts associated (per Service version). Artifacts such as WSDLs, XSDs and indeed anything that can add to the richness of understanding of the Service can be uploaded. The desired design commonality is not, however, limited to the technical aspects of the Service: cross-cutting concerns are ever present in IT architectures. Those of interest to the business fall in the realm of Policies governing Security, Quality of Service and Contract Compliance. Anypoint’s Runtime Policy Management enables the centralisation of Policy application: when new policies are dictated by the ever changing business model, they can be applied at runtime in a global fashion or on a per-consumer-contract based approach. For example, Security Policies can be applied to a particular consumer of a Service or to all Consumers without effecting the uptime of the Service.

Service Abstraction

Care should be taken to avoid Service Consumer to Service implementation coupling which could be brought about by exposing too much information about a Service. The principle of Service Abstraction promotes the type of Information Hiding that should also allow the Service owner to provide various levels of Quality of Service according to agreements with any potential Consumer. Anypoint facilitates this abstraction with its Contract Management feature. Service Consumers can choose to tie their use of a Service to a Contract for that service which guarantees for them a Service Level Agreement. You could expose a Service on Anypoint which has a number of SLA tiers associated with it. Consumers who have signed up for a certain SLA will use the same service as those with higher expectations, for example some Consumers might have a rate limit of 10 calls per hour (or any time unit) while others may have a higher 50 calls. The differentiation is made at the level of the contract, so the Service has no knowledge of its multiple usage scenarios. 

Secure Governance

All of the above functionality delivered by Anypoint Service Registry is realised while being particularly mindful of the tight security requirements of your Enterprise.  Anypoint Service Registry is protected with the best the Industry has to offer in the area of Security. Communication between Mule Enterprise Service Bus and Anypoint is executed by way of a secure Agent protected by WebSocket technology and HTTPS. At no point in time are any information sets contained in the messages passing through Mule sent up to the Service Registry. Anypoint only has knowledge of the meta-data associated with a Service. Likewise, access to this same Service meta-data is strictly protected by OAuth 2 based access-control so that only registered Service Owners and Service Consumers can see it whether that be on Anypoint’s UI or through its RESTful API.

See for yourself

We suggest you take a look yourself and see how Anypoint can help you guarantee the success of your SOA initiative.

About Nial Darbey

Nial Darbey has written 8 post in this blog.

Pre-Sales Engineer

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Filed under: Business of SaaS, CloudHub, Mule ESB | Social tagging: Anypoint > governance > service registry

We’re excited to announce that we will be sponsoring SAP’s Sapphire Now conference, taking place May 14 -16 in Orlando Florida. We will be showcasing MuleSoft’s SAP integration solutions to the 16,000 delegates in attendance and demonstrating our unique ability to connect SAP to other SaaS and on-premise applications such as Salesforce, NetSuite, ADP, and Oracle.

MuleSoft offers four SAP-certified solutions that make it fast and easy to connect SAP to the rest of the enterprise:

• The MuleSoft Enterprise Gateway for SAP provides bi-directional communication via application link enabling (ALE) and iDocs technology with SAP solutions.

• The MuleSoft SAP NetWeaver PI Gateway for Salesforce.com is a pluggable and easily deployed PI adapter that connects SAP NetWeaver PI with Salesforce and other SaaS applications.

• The MuleSoft for SuccessFactors solution is a cloud-based integration solution that connects SuccessFactors to any application or data source, SaaS or on premise.

• The MuleSoft for Customer OnDemand solution is a cloud-based integration solution that connects CustomerOnDemand to any application or data source.

If you plan on attending the Sapphire please stop by booth #1825 to learn more and enter our raffle to win $1,000 toward your dream vacation. To learn more about how MuleSoft can help you can integrate with SAP, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Hope to see you there!

Other helpful links:

Integrating with SAP webinar
Learn fundamental SAP integration building blocks, SAP integration alternatives, how the MuleSoft SAP connector makes integration simple and effective, and common use cases for the MuleSoft SAP connector.

Integrating SAP with Salesforce webinar
Integrating SAP and Salesforce? Join us to learn how this can be done painlessly with easy developer tooling that doesn’t sacrifice performance and power.

About Amelia Cady

Amelia Cady has written 11 post in this blog.

Channel Marketing Manager

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Filed under: CloudHub, Events, MuleSoft

It has now been nearly a month since Mule 3.4 was released and coming back from the 8 city tour Spring 2013 Mule summit, I can truly say there is tremendous excitement within the Mule community around the great features that this release offers.

In the coming weeks, key members of the MuleSoft team who were behind this release will be blogging about its various features and capabilities. Here is what this blog post line-up looks like:

• Seven Anypoint DataMapper 3.4 Tricks You Didn’t Know About
• Mule High Availability – A Walk-through of New Mule 3.4 Features
• Mule Studio 3.4 Visual Flow Debugger Walk-through
• DevKit 3.4 in Action – What’s New and Exciting in Mule 3.4
• Hidden Gems in Mule Studio 3.4

I am eager to read each and every one of these blog posts as they will be highlighting the powerful capabilities that we have introduced fin Mule 3.4 to improve developer productivity and further elevate Mule as the best integration platform in the market today. Stay tuned for these blog posts to be published in the coming weeks!

If there are other topics that you’d like to see blogged please leave your suggestions in the comments.

About reza.shafii

Reza Shafii has written 6 post in this blog.

Reza is a Director of Product Management, and in his spare time likes to code, go wine tasting, and do some road biking.

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Filed under: Mule ESB, Mule Studio | Social tagging: DataMapper > high availability > Mule > Mule 3.4 > Studio

MuleSoft has been named one of the “Best Places to Work” by the SF Business Times. The Times’ rankings are based on anonymous, voluntary surveys which rank their employer in areas such as teamwork, retention, co-workers, manager effectiveness, trust in senior leadership, benefits and overall job satisfaction.

So what is it about MuleSoft that makes it such a great place to innovate and work? I joined MuleSoft about 6 months ago as VP of Engineering, so I have been able to look at things from a newcomer’s perspective.

As I reflect on what I’ve seen over the past few months, it’s become clear that although the company has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past year, we’ve focused on maintaining the culture and company DNA that makes us unique and special. Here are a few examples…

Hire Great People
We have a huge challenge ahead of us – to disrupt a $500 billion industry – and it’s going to take some of the smartest and highly motivated people in the world to do it. It starts with every person who comes in the door. We constantly look for people that are curious, creative, deep problem solvers and results oriented. It’s great to be in a company where everyone around you raises the bar.

Open 
Transparency is key for any company that wants their employees make great decisions and feel like they are key to the success. Revenue, metrics and goals are shared with the whole company, all the time. Weekly all-hands meetings allow employees to ask any questions on their minds and get direct and honest answers. We maintain an open workspace without any offices – our CEO sits at a desk next to our engineers and marketing team, making it a very open and casual environment. The final aspect of openness is on a personal level – employees at MuleSoft are direct with each other and speak honestly and openly, there is no politics – all of this leads to an environment of trust.

Feel Empowered
All our employees feel empowered to make decision and take initiative. Growing at the pace we do we come across new and unique challenges every day. Everyone feels empowered to personally remove obstacles and get things done.

Be Creative
We look for creative people, who enjoy a challenge and coming up with unique solutions to really hard problems. From engineering to marketing to sales I see people constantly coming up with new ideas and novel ways of solving problems I haven’t seen before. Creativity and innovation seems to happen on every level across the company.

Engineering culture
We were founded as an open source company and we value technology innovation, team collaboration and building great software products. Our developers get to work on some of the most challenging and complex problems including creating products that power integration at some of the biggest companies in the world and building next generation cloud platforms.

We hold meetups and hackathons many times a year where our engineers brainstorm new ideas, use bleeding edge technologies and work together to improve our products and take them in new and unique directions. In our hackathon last month we had over 18 projects and ideas that our team worked on over a 24 hour period, many of which will end up in our product suite or being adopted by engineering. The ideas ranged from a raspberry-pi enabled robotic car running Mule to a version of our Cloud ESB supporting HA using Redis on AWS to a speech-to-text translation engine to route calls to the correct support team.

Our engineers also get a lot of opportunity to travel and meet customers at company events and receive feedback first hand from the customers using our products.

Enjoy the ride
We believe it’s possible to be ambitious, hard working and game change an industry while also having a fun time doing it. Whether it’s all-company white water rafting trips, weekly happy hours, cooking each other waffles for breakfast or creating fun videos that make us laugh every time we see them over a beer.

There are over 150,000 developers using our platform and over 3,500 companies worldwide. Not many companies of our size have those statistics and scale behind them. Yet we feel like we’re only getting started. It’s great to be doing this in a company that has now been voted one of the best places to work, again.

If you think this may be the best place to wok for you, we are hiring.

About james.donelan

James Donelan has written 1 post in this blog.

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