Part 1. Core Mule

Mule is a lightweight, event-driven enterprise service bus and an integration platform and broker. As such, it resembles more a rich and diverse toolbox than a shrink-wrapped application. In the first chapter of this book, we’ll introduce you to the history of its origins and the competing projects that exist on the market, and then we’ll immediately dive into a quick tutorial that will get your feet wet and your mouth watering!

In chapter 2, we’ll go through an extensive review of the principles involved in processing messages with Mule. You’ll learn the notions of flows, message sources, and processors and will look deep into the structure of the Mule message. The Mule Expression Language (MEL) will be introduced too.

Chapter 3 will be the first one dedicated to one of the major moving parts of Mule: transports and connectors. You’ll discover the most prominent protocols that the platform supports in the context of actual configuration samples. You’ll also learn how connectors can help you interact with the cloud by looking at a simple Twitter example.

A second important feature of Mule is message transformation. Chapter 4 will show you how to take advantage of Mule transformers and how to create new ones.

Message routing is a crucial facet of enterprise message buses. We’ll explore the advanced capacities of Mule in this domain in chapter 5.