by Peter Delia, and Antoine Borg

ESB. SOA. CXF. JXF. EIP. EAI. These are just a few of the myriad acronyms that make our work harder, not because the subject matter is complex but because the subject matter is vast. What is the real definition of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Should you perform transformations on an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) or should that be a service? There are so many things that are not standardized or that are being debated in online forums around the globe.

The thing is, once you've decided that you might need to use an ESB—whether as part of an Enterprise Integration Project (EIP) or as part of a wider SOA initiative, you're faced with a second problem. How do you use it? Vendors are great when it comes to certain types of documentation, but locking yourself into a single vendor's embrace may not be your cup of tea. In the open-source world, while there is a great wealth of documentation available, you need to trawl through wikis, forums, newsgroups, and conferences to get it all.

Our goal when we set out was to take everything we learned while building course materials to teach developers about Mule in the classroom, and make it available in book form. We take a reader who is new to Mule and perhaps ESBs through a series of logical steps starting from basic concepts to building Mule components such as routers and transformers. After reading this book you will be able to write full-blown Mule applications.