10/03/2006

MuleSource, a provider of open source infrastructure and integration software, today released version 1.3 of Mule, a Java-based platform that has become the world's most-used open source solution for enterprise integration challenges.

ebizQ received the following details:

Mule 1.3 can be downloaded for free at the Mule project homepage: http://mule.mulesource.org/ . New features in Mule 1.3 support the platform's growing popularity as an enterprise service bus (ESB) for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) scenarios. Mule 1.3 further supports XFire a next-generation SOAP framework that makes service-oriented development approachable through an easy to use API and support for common standards. Mule developers can now seamlessly interoperate between XFire, Apache Axis, WebMethods Glue and .Net Web Services. Mule 1.3 also supports popular application server transaction managers, including BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JRun, JBoss, Resin and generic JNDI-based support.

"As the Mule community has surpassed the 1,000 developer mark, one of the most popular use cases of the technology has been enabling SOA," said Ross Mason, creator of Mule and now CTO of MuleSource. "With other ESB approaches, developers are typically required to learn proprietary methodologies and toolkits. With Mule, if you know Java, you can do full-scale integration - including retrofitting legacy J2EE applications that weren't originally constructed with services-orientation in mind. Mule 1.3 includes some great contributions from our development community who have used the platform to enable a wide variety of different types of applications."

Mule's simplified development model has also led developers to use the technology in a wide range of other types of common enterprise integration scenarios. Top Wall Street investment banks with trillions of dollars under management are using Mule as the backbone for data transport in high-volume trading environments, frequently side-by-side with JMS or IBM MQ Series. Mule is also increasingly being used in tandem with the Spring Framework and Apache Tomcat to create the so-called "SMuT" stack -- an open source application server alternative. These complimentary open source technologies all honor the premise of simple-to-use but powerful frameworks enabling developers to build enterprise applications from plain Java objects (POJOs).

"We see many of our customers getting excellent results combining Mule and the Spring Framework" said Rod Johnson, CEO of Interface21, creators of the Spring application framework. "The products integrate well and share a similar appeal to users, offering a simple, productive programming model that scales up to real-world enterprise requirements."

As Mule has grown to become the industry's most-used open source platform for integration, so have the needs of Mule users, who now have an official support and services organization option. Earlier today, MuleSource officially launched a comprehensive set of support and services directly from the developers of the Mule project. MuleSource's support plans encompass bug fixes, issue resolution and developer assistance, including configuration and optimization. MuleSource support provides developers with everything they need in a single, unified offering to successfully develop and deploy business critical applications using Mule.

"For any technology in a production environment, large-scale enterprises need the assurance of 24x7 support," said Mason. "With the creation of MuleSource, we are now able to provide users with that safety net. We have assembled a great team of experienced Mule developers, and the launch of MuleSource is good for both the Mule developer community and the user base."

Mason started the Mule project in 2003. Frustrated by integration "donkey work" Mason set out to create a new platform that emphasized ease of development and re-use of components. Today Mule has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, with large-scale production usage at more than 100 enterprises, including several Fortune 100 organizations. With more than one billion transactions passed through Mule servers since 2005, Mule is the industry's most battle-tested open source integration approach.

"The original vision for Mule was an adaptive, logically-simple integration framework with a notion of zero intrusion," said Mason. "The Mule developer community has continued to evolve the technology with that philosophy in mind. Mule provides a framework that you can get up and running in less than an hour, and allows you to do serious integration with just basic Java skills. I think this is what enterprise developers want from their integration platform, and that's why Mule has been so well received."

Other new community-contributed features built into Mule 1.3 include additional performance upgrades, including faster HTTP transport, JMS session caching upgrades, and optimization of meta data handling to increase execution times for higher throughput. With the 1.3 release, Mule services can now invoke (or be invoked by) Spring remoting services. A new HiveMind container also allows developers to obtain objects from a HiveMind registry to use as service components or to configure the Mule server. JavaSpaces support allows services to consume and publish events transactionally from local and remote spaces. Developers are invited to join the Mule community at http://mule.mulesource.org.