Mule in Action
Author: David Dossot, John DEmic, Victor Romero
Review created: 2015-03-09
Mule in Action is a book on how to develop for the Mule enterprise integration platform. It also contain information on how to configure and tune Mule.
The book is divided into 14 chapters, each of which describing a certain aspect of Mule.
The first chapter gives describes how do download, install and run Mule. It also gives a short introduction to Mule Studio which is a graphical application that can be used to develop "programs" for Mule.
The following chapters contain information about the different parts that are available when developing programs for Mule. Among others, the following topics are discussed:
- Flows
- Connectors
- Transformers
- Components
- Routers
The topics are discussed in quite a detail.
The last part of the book contains chapters dealing with transactions, security and performance.
The general impression of the book is that it is a comprehensive introduction to the Mule server. All things that I wanted to know (and many things that I did not want to know) about Mule is included in the book. It covers Mule Expression Language (MEL) in depth and describes how to construct flows containing all the major items (connectors, components, translators, ...) provided by Mule.
As most of the configuration of Mule is done in XML files, the book contains lots of XML. It sometimes feels like half of the contents in the book is XML, but when checking that by browsing through the book, I realize that this is not entirely true. The plain text overweights the XML listings. Barely. I think that the many XML listings is a good thing, however. The reason for reading the book is, presumably, that you want to learn how to configure Mule in order to accomplish different things, and Mule is configured using XML. Hence, a multitude of XML listings is a good thing.
In most of the examples in the book a fictitious company called Prancing Donky figures. Its systems seem to have integrations with very many other systems, and we are in the examples told how those integrations are implemented using Mule. To have a running example like this is mostly a good thing, I think. It makes it a little more interesting to read the examples compared to the case when no "background story" exists.
An extra benefit of bying the book is that the electronic version of the book can be downloaded for free. I downloaded the PDF-version, but other formats are available as well. I admit that I prefer to read the paper version of a book, but having the electronic version is perfect when one wants to search for something.
So would I recommend Mule in Action to a fellow programmer? Yes, I would. To anyone interested in developing with Mule the book is a very good resource. It's a well written tutorial on how to develop with mule and contains both basic stuff and explanations on more advance topics, e.g. where the thread boundaries are located in a flow. The book is also useful as a reference as it contains material on very many Mule-related topics.
As with many other books, most of the subjects covered can be found on the net. However, my impression is that when googling for Mule related topics, a lot of the hits refers to older versions of Mule and it can be hard to extract the good links from the outdated ones. In these cases it's good to have Mule in Action to browse through. Especially good in these situations is to have the electronic version of the book, as it is easier search in.
Summary: a good book about a somewhat dull subject.
Rating: 4 out of 5.