Mule’s file connector allows us to read and write files to and from the underlying file system. Conveniently, we can also use stream large files rather than reading the whole lot in but what is the difference in behaviour in each case?
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Interesting question from a class last week: Since splitting is an outbound routing pattern, what should I do if I wish to perform a splitting operation on an inbound route? What if I want to split while receiving messages?

One solution would be to create a new Inbound Router and implement the pattern there. This would certainly be the cleanest way of doing things. (If you do so, don’t forget to upload it to the MuleForge project so that others can use the router too!)
An easier solution would be to concatenate services together.

– Have a single service that receives the inbound message. If there is no router on the inbound and if this is a bridge service, the message is handed over to the outbound router collection.
– Use the appropriate outbound splitter router to split the message. Send all message fragments to a single endpoint, e.g., vm://split.message
– Set up this single endpoint (vm://split.message) as the sole inbound endpoint for a new secondary service.

The secondary service now has received the split message and can handle the individual message fragments individually.

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When using the VM transport asynchronously, you might want to persist any pending messages before Mule is properly shut down. We talk about this in our Mule ESB Developer Training course and explain how to configure it. Last week, while lecturing, I got a question that I had not heard before.
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Teaching the Mule for System Administrators course last week meant that I spoke about JMX too, as usual. JMX on its own is not particularly interesting, but coupled with the Mule MX4j agent, you can quickly see some results in a browser.
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The Axis connector in Mule can comfortably send and receive Java objects along endpoints.  The only problem is that simple Java types are handled natively (String, int, etc) and Java objects that contain these sort of things are also handled natively.  If you wish to pass an object that contains another complex object, some further configuration is necessary

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I delivered our developers course last week and got a question about the MuleClient that I had never really thought about before: “Is it possible to use send() and wait indefinitely?”

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I know that I normally only post on Mondays and Thursdays and that I’ve already posted today but wanted to bring this to your attention.  Earlier on this year, we ran an on-line course – “Upgrading from Mule 1.x to Mule 2.x” and had positive feedback from the Mule community.  Due to this, we’re going to offer more courses on-line – and best of all is that we’re offering some of them for free.

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Here at Ricston, we know that people who have used Mule 1.x for quite awhile would not be interested in our “Developing Enterprise Applications with Mule” course as the value they’d get out of it would be limited. We knew this when we were upgrading our courses for Mule 2 too.

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I’ve mentioned how I was in Paris teaching a group of students early this week.  The experience was interesting mainly because it’s the first time that I lectured to students for whom English was not a main language.  it also gave me an opportunity to practise my French (which is dire need of improvement!).

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[Note: I'm in Paris today teaching our "Architecting Enterprise Applications Using Mule" course so I will continue the transformer series later on this week - Antoine]

I’m not sure I agree with Rich Seeley’s claim that “the data layer was ignored by vendors in the early stages of SOA tool development” in his article on techtarget.com

In the article, he goes on to show how the data layer is being met by a new product from Iona Technologies and mentions how this makes life easier for anyone working in the SOA field as it lets you tie the data model to the services as well as other items.

While tools can always be improved, I’m not so sure that the data layer was ignored by vendors. Standard SOA principles dictate that the data model to be used should be defined; indeed the data model is one key design choice that you should think about carefully as we point out in our Architecting Enterprise Applications using Mule course.

Just because there wasn’t a feature labelled “Data Model” doesn’t mean that the vendor has ignored it. It’ll be interesting to evaluate Iona’s product and see what the hype is about though

PS: I tried posting this as a comment on techtarget.com but their permissions seem to be on the blink.

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