Author: Neelam Deshmukh
History
- With this growing digitalization globally, IT industries are coming with many new frameworks, languages, and integration to meet customers’ expectations. To remain competitive, expedite, and centralized transformations are the need of time.
- Customers expect Integration in one plate that is a Connected experience. E.g., When we visit any restaurant, we accept Veg/Non-Veg/Chinese/Italian/Continental/Desert, etc., category items to be listed in one Menu card instead of having multiple cards for each category.
Ross Mason and Dave Rosenberg founded MuleSource in 2006. Mule stands for “donkey work,” and Mulesoft means software that helps get rid of “donkey work,” eliminating complex integrations by moving logics in a Connector, and simplifies development just providing configurations.
The company changed its name to MuleSoft in 2009 and was later acquired by Salesforce.
MuleSoft helped organizations to change, minimize development and innovate faster by making it easy to connect any application, data, and device with APIs — Application Programming Interface.
What is MuleSoft?
- Mule, the runtime engine of Anypoint Platform, is a lightweight Java-based middleware and IPaas solution as it has a Mule enterprise service bus (ESB) with the power of a cloud hub. It’s an API management and integration platform that allows developers to connect applications quickly and easily, enabling them to exchange data.
- It enables easy integration of existing systems, regardless of the different technologies that the applications use, including JMS, Web Services, JDBC, HTTP, and more.
What is an API and API Management Platform?
- API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, which allows two applications to talk to each other.
- Considering the above restaurant example:
- Imagine customer as a Client who looks Menu card and order food item
- Waiter takes customer order which is an API which takes client request and sends it to server
- Kitchen is a Server who processes the request and sends a response (ordered food) to API (Waiter), who deliver a dish to Customer
- API Management Platform is a platform where we can Design, Develop, Deploy, Manage, Secure, Reuse APIs using MuleSoft in one place.
- Imagine it like a restaurant where we can enjoy all flavours of dishes in one place.
- The below image shows a glance at MuleSoft Anypoint Platform services:
Why MuleSoft?
- Many companies are deciding to adopt MuleSoft for great customer experience as it’s driven by API-led connectivity methodology for connecting data between applications through APIs.
- The API-led approach allows reusability of APIs where many of the existing assets and APIs can be reused to save time and effort.
- In API led connectivity approach, the APIs are categorized into three layers: System, Process, and Experience
- System APIs are responsible for ‘talking’ directly to back-end systems. Their main role is to hide the complexity of the underlying systems
- Process APIs merge, process, and shape data delivered by one or multiple System APIs for a specific business purpose. They must be private and should never be exposed to the public for use
- Experience APIs combines information from multiple APIs and can be thought of wrapper either to Process or System API but their role is to deliver this information to a specific channel ie Customer
- Mule components can be molded into any type and can easily integrate anything to a component from any framework.
- MuleSoft’s is more than a platform that hosts data and APIs and provides an infrastructure that includes a number of tools and services
Conclusion
Mulesoft provides easy integration under one platform and provides connected, seamless customer and employee experiences. It solves business challenges by reducing development effort and product launch lifecycles.
