MULE-SOA

Agenda 1.Business context and problems faced

2. The idea of a service-oriented online architecture

3. How and why we selected Mule4. Overview and examples of Mule use cases5. Best practices and learnings

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■We did not Google „open source ESB“ to select Mule …

■ Instead we did a qualitative and quantitative comparison of major open source ESB products using different criteria:

■ Primary: professional maintenance, commercial support with SLAs, licensing, performance,operations by IT department possible

■ Secondary: documentation, code quality, activity and size of community, Spring support, sync and async communication, supported standards, app server integration, development tools

■ Mule quickly emerged as the favored ESB product, followed by Fuse ESB and WSO2

■ Static analysis of the Mule sources (Sonar, Structure101) showed acceptable quality

■ Modularization and project structure looks well- thought-out and enables light-weight deployment

■ Good code quality, in spite of found violations and partially low documentation

■ Test coverage is reasonably high to ensure correct function in case of changes

How and why we selected Mule

Based on the proposed architecture scenarios we

couldidentify the requirements

on the ESB product

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■ Different load scenarios with constant and increasing parallel requests (Apache JMeter)

■ Measurement of performance relevant metrics using Software-EKG

■ Live profiling of system behavior (JProfiler)

■ All findings have been reported to MuleSoft

■ Together with MuleSoft we were able to solveall the found issues:

■ MuleSoft supplied a working patch for the Registry synchronization issue within 2 days

■ Other issues could simply be addressed using the optimized configuration parameters (thread pool settings, …) supplied to us

■ This was decisive for the confidence and the final decision for Mule ESB

How and why we selected MuleIntensive performance tests uncovered several

findings(with Mule 3.1.1) …

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Agenda1. Business context and problems faced2. The idea of a service-oriented online

architecture3. How and why we selected Mule 4.Overview and examples of Mule use cases 5. Best practices and learnings

5

Clustered deployment of Mule ESB as a web

applicationfor scalability and high

availability■Requirement: Mule ESB had to be deployed as a Java web application to be operated by the IT department

■Embedding Mule into a web app is pretty

straight forward using the a context listener

■Custom listener implementation required to customize working directory and various other system properties

■Each Glassfish v2.1 app server instance runs with 512mb heap space on SuSe linux

■The reverse proxies are Apache 2.2 instances using mod_proxy with stickyness

■The final WAR is simply assembled from the Maven artifacts of the individual Mule apps

■Hot-deployment of individual apps not required

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Overview and examples of Mule use cases

Overview and examples of Mule use cases

Unified web service interface to access details

userfrom heterogeneous data

sources

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■ Access to the endpoint is controlledusing a Spring security filter

■ Each data source has specific POJO implementation or private flow

■ Choice is based on payload using a Groovy evaluator

■ Only minor Java code required

■ Web service interface and types

■ Custom transformers

■ Choice uses CXF operation header

■ XSLT to transform XML/RPC to JAXB XML structure

Overview and examples of Mule use cases

Web service to XML/RPC service adapter to access

theBZST service for simple and

qualified VAT checks

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■ Web service interface and types defined asPOJI and POJOs with JAX-WS annotations

■ The service component only performs validation and preprocessing of request

Overview and examples of Mule use cases

Web service to email service adapter to send

supportrequests to a ticketing

backend system

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■ The actual sending using an SMTPconnector is performed asynchronous

■ Custom transformer uses Velocity to convert request object to email body

Agenda1. Business context and problems faced2. The idea of a service-oriented online

architecture3. How and why we selected Mule4. Overview and examples of Mule use cases 5.Best practices and learnings

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■ Mule provides several built-in components to test Mule XML and flow definitions

■ The MuleFunctionalTest allowed us to test our flows within the IDE

■ No deployment to a standalone instance required, thus reducing turn-around times

■ The MuleClient is not really intuitive to use

■ Smart combination of SoapUI test cases together with mock services allowed 100% local and off-site development

■ Learning: develop as much as possible asPOJOs and use „traditional“ unit testing

■ Learning: take the time to write a good mock for the service you are integrating

Best practices and learningsTest driven development using MuleFunctionalTests,

SoapUI tests and mock services

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■ „The Leanest, Meanest ESB: Mule ESB is the world's most efficient Enterprise Service Bus” (http://www.mulesoft.com/mule-esb-small-footprint)

■ We went well below the mentioned figures by building a custom Mule distribution tuned and optimized for our specific use cases

■ Based on the default distribution assembly XML found in the Mule community sources, we

1. got rid of everything not required in production, mainly docs and examples, but also not required Tanuki EXE wrapper binaries, etc.pp.;

2. selected only the required Mule modules and transports our uses cases really required, this reduced the amount of 3rd party libs significantly;

3. used Maven dependency management to have full control of all used 3rd party libraries, used more recent versions where possible (e.g. Spring, CXF, Saxon)

4. added our Mule apps and their dependencies, then repackaged

■ Thorough load tests lead to optimized JVM parameters and high performance:-Xmx=128m -Xms=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=64m -XX:NewRatio=2 -XX:SurvivorRatio=12 -XX:+UseParallelGC-XX:+UseParallelOldGC

Best practices and learnings

Building a custom Mule distribution for 100%

control ofall dependencies and optimal performance

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96 MB

30 MB

37 MB

■ A migration of the whole infrastructure in one go would have been impossible; the system needs to be available around the clock

■ Instead a staged migration of the infrastructurecomponents and applications has been used:

■ Phase 1: Migration of all online servers, application by application, introduction of the primary ESB with first required services

■ Phase 2: Integration of a new online portal, operated inparallel to the old portal infrastructure

■ Phase 3: Migration of all „legacy“ portals to access the new online infrastructure components

■ After each phase the behavior of the new components was monitored closely to detect any problems in production

■ The services and backend systems integrated by the primary ESB instance constantly grew (I might still be growing in next phases)

Best practices and learningsNo big bang: start small and migrate in several

phases

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