Friday 10 March 2017

Modern Integrations - Need of ESB like Mule

I recently architected a Smart Glass based AR platform. The idea was cool, build a secure, lightweight, reliable, configurable and performant platform for enabling Smart Glasses to connect with enterprise systems. Idea was to allow business users - hands on task force - to work efficiently, execute business processes while keeping their hands free, from various gadgets, scanners, blue-tooth devices etc.

So the middle ware platform was the key component that could help achieve this goal. As a version 1.0 , I architected the entire solution from scratch, building REST based web application platform with JWT tokens securing the services. Few customization hooks allow easy extension of the platform and there we had, a platform that fulfilled the needs and a demoable solution was in place. By design this lightweight/stateless/cache-enabled platform was also scallable - tested upto 300 concurrent users on 4GB/dual core CPU machine with response times as low as 300ms. Perfect.

As the idea/solution saw light of the day, and more and more enquiries started coming in, a natural progression was initialised to move this platform to a more scalable architecture. An ESB based platform was the way to go. Looking at the popularity, availability of the community version and several other factors, MuleSoft was chosen as platform of chioce.  Idea was to leverage the infrastructural capabilities of the ESB - like scaling, HA, performance etc. and focus on enhancing our platform.

Getting started with Mule was pretty straightforward. Downloaded Anypoint Studio, referred to the excellently documented details with examples, some tutorials, some videos online and first application deployed.Tested, works like a charm. Easy.

Challenge now was to make the ESB runtime part of our existing web app based platform and run Mule as a service in the app container. I plan to write a separate technical blog on this one, but in short, the existing documentation helped to good extent. After some r&d and troubleshooting, I was able to embed the Mule Runtime engine inside our web based platform and was able to execute a simple Mule Flow from within this webapp. Woohoo.

It needed some more focused efforts to release first version of our platform on Mule to a respectable stage. Attaching here initial sample flow/s (not disclosing it entirely of course - IP reasons).



Serious work continues to go in enhancing this Mule based platform, several features in roadmap, deployed quite easily on Mule ESB, features like enhanced logging, audit trails, filtering, polling, scheduling and so on.

Awaiting exciting times to come.