Its never too late to use Mule

Its never too late to use Mule as an integration container, thats what I have figured out much to my pleasure after working with Mule in one of my recent projects. Mule can be used very much as an after thought, for providing the much needed integration support for an existing application. Best part is that Mule's ability to provide standards based integration for existing applications is totally non-intrusive, that is to say the legacy code need not be aware that it is being used by Mule. Mule Integration / Service container has a very flexible and intuitive configuration format. Using configuration changes itself the core business logic (application POJOs) can be used and reused in imaginative combinations to realise some fanatastic integrations with very little coding effort if at all. For example, lets say u had a business logic POJO class which had the basic persistence functionality in the form of interfaces pertaining to Create Read Update and Delete functionality. Using Mule one can easily provide integration for invoking this CRUD functionality through the following transports: Web Services (SOAP/HTTP) Web Services (XFIRE/REST) RMI File System TCP servlets/HTTP SMTP XMPP (instant messenger) only in a matter of minutes, using mule configuration alone. Also writing suitable transformers support for a variery of input and output data formats can be provided and these transformers can be used in the configurations in a chain-like manner to take the data through multiple transformations eventually to the core business logic Mule also provides for custom routers and out-of-the-box routers for realising a variety of integration use cases quickly. Support for exception based routing is also present. Best of all Mule is extensible at various levels and writing custom routers, filters, transformers, channels etc is remarkably easy. All in all, Mule provides very powerful and flexible integration capabilties for existing applications. Its definitely worth spending the time to read thru Mule and get an idea of its capabilties, u never know what weird integration requirements, ur managers may throw at you next :)