Chapter 3. Working with connectors
This chapter covers
- Using Mule connectors to integrate with disparate protocols
- Consuming APIs with Mule cloud connectors
- Integrating with SaaS APIs
Moving data around is the crux of integration. Precious time spent authoring WSDLs, writing JMS consumers, or struggling with a vendor’s obtuse API paradoxically contributes little value to an application. It instead has the opposite effect: burning you out writing code that doesn’t contribute to solving the business issue at hand. Even when such code is trivially developed, implementations will still differ across projects and between teams. This increases the difficulty when bringing developers up to speed or when developers move between teams. Developers must be careful that their transport code is thread-safe, handles errors correctly, and updates as protocols and APIs change.
Let’s revisit the concrete, but relatively simple, example of accepting an HTTP request and sending the content of the request to a JMS queue, which we implemented using Mule in chapter 1 of this book. This is conceptually a fairly simple scenario, but manually implementing the same application without an integration framework like Mule would require the following steps: