MuleSoft Extends Range of Integration Options

MuleSoft extended the integration platform options it makes available to developers with the release today of both an upgrade of its core platform and the launch of a mobile edition that is simpler to deploy.

Ken Yagen, vice president of products for MuleSoft (parent company of ProgrammableWeb), says Anypoint Platform for Mobile is a lighter-weight edition of the MuleSoft integration software that makes it much easier for IT organizations to set up back-end-as-a-service platforms in support of mobile applications.

Deployable on premises or in the cloud, the latest edition of the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform adds Anypoint Exchange, which enables anyone to publish templates and patterns for common integration scenarios. In addition, MuleSoft has made available 14 Anypoint Templates for connecting with a variety of software-as-a-service applications.

MuleSoft has also extended support for REST-based APIs created using RAML-based modeling tools, which can be used to create APIs from the metadata associated with a particular JSON or XML data structure.

From a Microsoft perspective, MuleSoft announced that it is making it simpler to reference and consume APIs within Visual Studio as well as generate ASP.NET Web API 2-compatible APIs from a RAML definition. It is adding support for additional Microsoft APIs, including Microsoft SharePoint and Dynamics applications; connectivity with Microsoft Azure Service Bus APIs; and an ability to map between .NET objects and RAML APIs faster using a DataSense-enabled .NET Connector.

Finally, MuleSoft announced that it can now generate custom reports on API usage based on different application types and devices in JSON and CSV format, and provide management and monitoring of integrations with MuleSoft’s runtime API, including the ability to publish details to third-party systems like Nagios and Zabbix or plug in to existing continuous integration processes and tools such as Jenkins.

Yagen says that most enterprise IT organizations are still in the early stages of adopting a platform-centric approach to mobile application development. Rather than having to invest a massive amount of time and effort to integrate those applications, the mobile edition of MuleSoft make it a lot simpler for organizations to automatically generate integrations with a variety of back-end services without having to deploy a more comprehensive version of the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform that was designed to support a much wider variety of types and classes of application integration scenarios.

Rather than having to hard wire all those connectors, MuleSoft's approach to relying on metadata to generate integrations using APIs dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to build those reusable back-end integration services, Yagen says.

With more organizations taking a “mobile first” approach to application development these days, Yagen adds that it will be interesting to see just how many adopt a hybrid approach to integration that spans multiple types of MuleSoft implementations running inside and outside of the cloud.

In the meantime, the challenge most of them face is getting mobile applications that depend on a wide range of back-end services to bring value to the business into production as quickly as possible.