MuleSource readies open source SOA governance

Branching out in the SOA space, MuleSource will introduce Tuesday its Mule Galaxy software, an open source SOA governance platform with an integrated registry and repository.

The company also will refresh its Mule open source ESB (enterprise service bus) and offer Mule Saturn, a lightweight BAM (business activity monitoring) tool that works with the ESB.

Mule Galaxy 1.0 stores and manages SOA artifacts and provides governance and lifecycle management. MuleSource is positioning Galaxy, Mule, and Saturn as products that make SOA infrastructure software more accessible to enterprises. The Community edition of Galaxy is available now, and a fully tested enterprise edition is due in the second quarter of this year.

"Basically, [Galaxy] makes services… available through kind of a subscription, like an RSS feed, and it allows you to define [service levels]," Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource CEO, said.

Working with Mule software or as a stand-alone component in an SOA infrastructure, Galaxy features a RESTful Atom Pub interface to simplify integration with frameworks such as Apache CXF and Windows Communication Foundation, MuleSource said. Support for artifact types is provided for Mule configuration, WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), policies, and custom artifacts. Enterprises can set their own policies.

Governance, MuleSource said, will become increasingly important as the number of in-use services grows. Galaxy increases reuse and lowers application development costs, improves collaboration, and enables centralized control of policies and management, the company said.

A Mule ESB user, while not planning to adopt Galaxy, nonetheless applauded its release.

"I think that's a great idea because the fact that it's open source allows a lot more transparency into what the code is doing and how it is doing it," said the user, Eugene Ciurana, director of systems infrastructure at LeapFrog Enterprises, makers of LeapFrog educational toys. LeapFrog has no plans to use Galaxy because its transactional systems do not leverage its Mule software.

In the ESB space, MuleSouce is offering Mule 1.5 Enterprise Edition, a subscription-only enterprise packaging of the company's ESB integration platform. "This is the first time that we're splitting the community and enterprise versions," Rosenberg said.

Mule's ESB moves and manages data between disparate systems. It supports multiple transport protocols, including Java Message Service, MQ Series, FTP, and HTTP. The ESB, MuleSource said, can process as many as 30 million messages per minute.

"We have higher performance at this point, we believe, than anybody," Rosenberg said. The enterprise-level product features remote diagnostics, patch management, and provisioning via the MuleHQ tool as well as support for BPEL and streaming of very large files. Remote diagnostics capabilities allow MuleSource support personnel to assess a system.

Nested routers in the ESB decouple service implementations from service interfaces. Multiple models are supported to manage runtime behavior, including SEDA (staged event-driven architecture), pipeline, and streaming.

LeapFrog has based its integrations on Mule.