Part 2. Running Mule

In part 1, you learned about the fundamentals of Mule. You discovered its philosophy, configuration principles, and major moving parts. You’ve also run examples that exercised the main building blocks of Mule services: transports, routers, transformers, and components. Part 2 will take you further and will guide you through the next steps toward running Mule in a production environment.

As an ESB and an integration platform, Mule supports several very different deployment strategies. In chapter 7, we’ll review these strategies. We’ll also explore the vast subject of deployment topologies and review different approaches for managing your deployments.

Problems happen. As tough as it is, Mule can stumble. This usually translates into exceptions being thrown. Chapter 8 will guide you in putting into place a sound error management strategy. You’ll also learn how to recover from connection flakiness and what Mule offers in terms of logging.

All enterprise applications are subject to security concerns, and Mule doesn’t elude these constraints. Chapter 9 will show you how to restrict access to certain resources with authentication and authorization mechanisms. You’ll also learn how to encrypt and decrypt data.

Mule is often deployed in environments where data integrity is critical. This is when using the abilities of transaction-aware transports, such as JMS or JDBC, usually comes into play. You’ll discover Mule’s transaction management mechanism in chapter 10.