ANALYSIS
MuleSource Gets a Little Bit Commercial

MuleSource, a provider of open source service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure software, has jumped into the SOA governance pool with the community release this week of Mule Galaxy 1.0.

Galaxy, an open source platform with integrated registry and repository, allows users to store and manage an increasing number of SOA artifacts, and can be used in conjunction with the Mule enterprise service bus (ESB) or as a standalone product. It was also designed with federation in mind, being pluggable to other registries.

In other news, Mule also announced a subscription-only version of its ESB, as well as a beta version of Mule Saturn, an activity-monitoring tool for business processes and workflow.

Mule in the Cloud

The subscription ESB smacks of "Mule on-demand.com." It will be interesting to see how well this does in terms of uptake. Integration as a Service seems to be gaining traction. We're also told this "ESB in the cloud" supports IBM CICS (Customer Interaction Control System), which is interesting ... are we approaching transactional mashups en masse?

As enterprises use SOA to expand their consumption of services from both inside and outside the business, governance becomes an all-important issue for control. Galaxy provides such registry and repository features as lifecycle, dependency and artifact management -- along with querying and indexing.

A RESTful HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) Atom Pub interface facilities integration with such frameworks as Mule, Apache CXF and WCF. Galaxy also provides out-of-the-box support for various artifact types, including Mule, WSDLs (Web service definition languages) and custom artifacts.

Available for Download

Galaxy can be downloaded now, and a fully tested enterprise edition will be available in Q2 for Mule Enterprise subscribers.

On the ESB front, Mule has taken aim at the Fortune 2000 customer base with the introduction of Mule 1.5 Enterprise Edition, a subscription-only commercial enterprise packaging of the Mule ESB integration platform. Prior to this announcement, the ESB had been available only in the community edition.

It's sort of funny -- as commercial providers offer open source versions of their products, we also see open source providers handing up commercial versions. I guess that means everyone needs one of each? Perhaps the versions (a la Fedora to RHEL) are becoming alike, in that it takes a subscription of some sort to get the real goods and use them.

Past the Million Mark

Take the traffic when you can, I've always said. Mule's popularity was in evidence in November, when the company announced that community downloads had surpassed 1 million.

The new enterprise offering is available for a single annual fee and encompasses news features, including

• support for Apache CXF Web Services Framework;
• patch management and provisioning via MuleHQ;
• streaming of large data objects through Mule without being read into memory;
• nested routers to decouple service implementations from service interfaces;
• support for multiple models; and
• diagnostic feedback for customer support.

More information is available from the MuleSource site.

For users looking for a business-activity monitoring tool, MuleSource has released a beta version of Mule Saturn 1.0, which is designed to complement an SOA infrastructure by providing detailed logging and reporting on every transaction that flows through the Mule ESB.

Saturn allows staff to drill down on transaction details and set message-level breakpoints for deep log analytics, allowing for continuous custom improvement. Key features include

• business user view into workflow and state;
• process visualization;
• search on transaction, date, various IDs; and
• reporting on service-level agreements.

Saturn is available immediately to MuleSource subscribers.