Foreword

Secretly, my wife still harbors a little regret about the lost weekends I spent coding Mule, but without her, Mule would not have been created and the book you are reading would not exist.

Like thousands of developers before me, I was continually struggling with the complexities of systems integration. The problem was that the proprietary solutions of the day—there were no open source alternatives back then—set out to address integration by adding another piece of complexity to the problem. These products made too many assumptions about the environment and architecture, masking the ugliness with doodleware, slick demo applications, and suave salesmen. I used to work long hours trying to work around integration products rather than being able to leverage them. This resulted in me venting to the point where my wife firmly suggested that I stop complaining and do something about it. A Mule was born.