09/04/2007

MuleSource, a provider of open source infrastructure and integration software, announced today the launch of MuleForge (http://www.muleforge.org/), a shared community environment, offering a fully managed hosting site for Mule extensions and applications for the Mule ESB.

ebizQ received the following:

MuleForge provides a platform where developers can explore, download, test and contribute to a broad range of re-usable Mule extensions, which can be used to greatly reduce the effort required to complete an integration or SOA project.

MuleForge serves as a collaborative development base for the Mule community. In addition to applications and extensions for the Mule project, the forge offers tips, documentation and other resources.

Following the open source philosophy, the Mule community is encouraged to share non-business sensitive Mule extensions on MuleForge.

"I have spoken to many of our customers who have written custom components and transports for Mule." says Ross Mason, CTO and co-founder of MuleSource. "Often these extensions are not part of their core business, so hosting them on MuleForge means that these companies do not need to maintain this code and the Mule community can help fix and improve it."

With an expanding community around MuleForge, it is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for developers looking for resources, extensions and examples on how to use Mule on integration projects, thus saving time, developer resources and lowering the total cost of ownership.

According to Steve Craggs, an independent analyst at Lustratus, "Mule is a quick and easy to use integration tool that is non-intrusive, extensible and comes with all the benefits of an open source solution.

"MuleForge is an exciting new development, enabling MuleSource to leverage the active and creative community to drive broader and deeper product functionality and faster adoption through contributions from users across the world."

The new MuleForge already hosts more than 40 projects from the MuleSource core development team and various other contributors, and includes a Salesforce.com connector that allows developers to establish real-time communications between Salesforce.com and internal data sources through a simple, configuration-based approach. Other connectors such as SAP and AS/400 Data Queuing are already becoming popular. Other extensions of note are the JavaSpaces integration package and the SIP (session initiation protocol) connector, which simplifies the use of Mule with VoIP and other telco applications.

"Mule is the best integration engine on the market and the ESB of choice for high-performance, multi-protocol environments. It has a proven reputation and is responsible for securely and reliably moving high volume, mission critical enterprise data. We have written and shared different Mule adaptors on MuleForge. One example of this is that our customers can now cost effectively Codelmark their data by integrating Codel straight into the enterprise infrastructure. MuleForge will certainly help Codel reach a global audience," said Bob Hill, Chief Technology Officer at Codel.

The MuleForge offers an integrated developer environment including a source code repository (Subversion), an Issue Tracker, Wiki for documentation and continuous builder server (from Atlassian), project and release management tools, mailing lists, forums, and much more. The MuleForge team manages a Continuous Build System ensuring projects are healthy and work with current Mule versions. Being part of the MuleForge means that you'll get access to hundreds of developers and thousands of Mule users to help test and develop code and MuleForge provides community coverage for projects and the companies behind them.

"Mule provides a real alternative to proprietary vendors in the integration space evidenced by the number of projects where Mule is evaluated against more established offerings from the likes of IBM and Tibco. Mule has gained impressive worldwide market adoption and the sizeable Mule community now has a place to share and collaborate around a technology offering that has a growing user base." said Damian Raffell, VP EMEA Operations of MuleSource.