Chapter 4. The foundation of an integration solution
In this chapter:
Now that we’ve discussed the basics of Mule and ServiceMix, it’s time to examine the foundational elements of a full integration solution: integration logic and message flows.
Integration logic is simply the logic you need to build your integration solution. Open source ESBs provide a lot of functionality out of the box, but most solutions need additional logic. This additional logic may involve something as simple as changing the content of an incoming message, but it can be as complex as including validation rules for EDI messages. One of the great features of open source ESBs is that implementing logic for your integration solution is fairly easy.
Writing components for specific integration logic is similar to writing components for Java or JEE applications. Open source ESBs such as Mule and ServiceMix are developed to make it as simple as possible to “click” your Java components in an integration solution. Because there’s no large set of requirements, your Java components can remain independent of specific Mule and ServiceMix classes. We look at the implementation of integration logic with Mule in section 4.1 and with ServiceMix in section 4.2.