Introduction
With
increasing trend of using cloud and creating solutions in the form of
microservices, we are ending up with a large pool of small applications and
services which are scattered across the globe. This has led to interoperability
issues and service sprawl challenge where many applications include the code to
connect to other application. What we need here to resolve this issue is an
Enterprise Service Bus with the capability to connect to a wide spectrum of
heterogeneous applications. This spectrum includes legacy applications running
on premises to microservices hosted on the public cloud, from web applications
using JMS to mobile apps. The choice of ESB is crucial to make sure that you
need not carry the burden of writing adapters to connect to these systems on
your shoulder. MuleSoft presents you with a vast variety of connectors, which is
one of the biggest advantages of Mulesoft. Being open source and having a community,
the number of connectors are increasing day by day. MuleSoft also provides
DevKit, which helps you to create your own connectors to connect to your custom
applications and tools.
In
this paper, we will focus on the connectivity issues of applications and how MuleSoft
is helping us to get through these challenges.
Importance of connectivity
In
today’s age of information, cloud is playing crucial role of providing ease to
the startup, mid-sized and large enterprises to quickly develop and make
applications available to rest of the world. This had led to the creation of
many small applications or services by different organizations including startups.
Enterprise-grade packaged applications are getting replaced by multiple
services offered independently by different players. Your enterprise data is
now scattered in various systems like legacy systems, RDBMS, web application,
files and No SQL databases and are hosted on different networks like LAN,
in-premises data-centers, virtual networks, and clouds. While developing new
applications or services, you will have to connect with these systems to fetch
the required information.
Figure 1:
Application Landscape (courtesy: Mulesoft training department)
This
wide variety of approaches used in designing and hosting the application put
forward a different challenge of connecting to these applications.
Interoperability Challenges in connecting to heterogeneous applications
Different
applications/services you need to connect to, might be written using different
languages, use different data formats, hosted on different platforms, and
communicate using different protocols. Every application, which needs to
connect to other application or service, needs to be aware of all technical
details for communication. And when your IT landscape includes numerous such
applications, it leads to service sprawl making it difficult to manage numerous
point to point connections.
This
problem gave birth to the concept of EAI
(Enterprise Application Integration) where one single product, which is at the
heart of your architecture, will connect your application to rest of the
applications. The Connection from one application to another application gets
routed through this EAI application. This broker can quickly become a bottleneck
during heavy loads or can become a single point of failure. The concept is
further evolved to something called as Service
Bus but still uses a central routing component to pass messages from system
to system. Whereas bus is divided into multiple components which can be
distributed and scaled over the network.
Figure 2:
Service Bus Architecture
Few
of the known integration challenges are
·
Cloud Integration
·
ERP Integration
·
Mobile Application Integration
Anypoint Platform & Mule Runtime Engine
Anypoint
Platform is a hybrid integration platform that enables organizations to easily
build and rapidly scale an application network of apps, data, and devices
through APIs and integrations. Mule, the runtime engine of Anypoint Platform,
is a lightweight Java-based enterprise service bus (ESB) that allows developers
to connect applications together quickly and easily, enabling them to exchange
data.
MuleSoft Anypoint connectors
State
of the art Mulesoft Anypoint Connectors facilitates the integration of Mule
applications with third-party APIs and standard integration protocols. Anypoint
studio has set of the built-in connectors including standard connectors like
HTTP, email, file, FTP, JMS, and database. Other application specific connectors
include Amazon, Jetty, MongoDB, SAP, and Salesforce. These connectors can
directly be used in mule flow to connect to the internal and external systems.
Anypoint exchange provides a home to never-ending
list of connectors which can be quickly installed in studio and used to connect
to the application. Entries in this list include different categories as CRMs,
BPM tools, Cloud, Analytics tools, MOMs, ERPs, Social Media, RDBMS and NO-SQL
databases, IoT tools, Collaboration tools etc. Listing some of the connectors
here for reference.
CRM: Salesforce, Siebel, Microsoft Dynamics
Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure
ERP: SAP, Oracle JD Edwards, Peoplesoft
RDBMS and NO-SQL: MySQL, Oracle, Amazon RDS, Mango DB,
Cassandra
Collaboration: GitHub, JIRA, SharePoint, Google Tasks,
Documentum, Yammer
Social Media: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
Connector support categories
Anypoint connectors fall into one of
the following categories according to their developer and support level
available.
Community: MuleSoft or members of the MuleSoft community
write and maintain these connectors. You don’t need any special account or license
to use Community connector. Example: Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, JIRA
MuleSoft Certified: Developed by MuleSoft’s partners and
developer community and are reviewed and certified by MuleSoft. Example:
Splunk, Oracle JD Edward, Spark SQL, Pega, Hybris
Select: Maintained by Mulesoft, included in open
source Mule distribution, can be used by everyone. However, support is only
included in Anypoint Platform subscription. Example: LDAP, MongoDB, Amazon,
Workday, Hadoop
Premium: MuleSoft maintains Premium connectors. You
must have an active CloudHub Premium plan or an Enterprise subscription with an
entitlement for the specific connector you wish to use. Example: SAP, Oracle
Siebel, Google DFP, Peoplesoft
Creating custom connectors
An
Anypoint connector is an extension module that eases the interaction between
Mule application and external resources. These connectors hide the API complexity
from integration developer. You can create your own connector to connect to
your custom applications or tool developed within your organization. MuleSoft
Anypoint DevKit enables the development of MuleSoft Anypoint Connectors. Mule
connector has 2 operational sides. Mule-facing
side communicates with resource’s target-facing client side to enable content
to travel between Mule applications and the external target-facing resource.
Mule
facing side of the connector consists of a Main Java Class with @Connector
annotation. Configurable connector
attributes are annotated with @Configurable annotation and functionality is
annotated with @Processor attribute. Target facing side of a connector depends
on client technology that enables access to the resource. This functionality
consists of a class library and one or more classes that main classes use to
access client functionality.
Connectors provided by Major ESBs
Though
there are many solutions to this connectivity problem, all of them have their
advantages and disadvantages. Let us discuss connectors provided by major
players in the market.
Oracle ESB (OSB): provides
JCA transport that interacts with back-end Enterprise Information Systems
(EIS), letting these systems participate in the Service Bus integration
environment. With JCA adapters, you can integrate proxy and business services
with technologies like databases, file systems, FTP servers, messaging systems,
email, LDAP, Coherence cache, cloud services, Salesforce, SAP and Oracle
E-Business Suite. Oracle provides Transport SDK to develop custom transport
provider.
Tibco: With TIBCO universal
Connectors, you get one standardized drag and drop interface for all your
on-premises applications and cloud services in one place. Apart from the
standard connectors like http, email, database, JMS, ftp and file, TIBCO
provide connectors for Salesforce, Facebook, SAP, Amazon, NetSuite and many
more. TIBCO Connectors Software Development Kit helps IT organizations build connectors
for custom or specialized applications.
IBM Websphere ESB:
WebSphere Adapters provide a service-oriented approach to integration with EIS.
WebSphere Adapters are compliant with JCA 1.5. WebSphere include adapters for email,
flat files, FTP, JDBC, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel
Business Applications, and SAP Software. You can contribute own external
service or data wizard plug-in customized to suit to your organization
Contribution from Mulesoft’s Community
MuleSoft
has a community where members are actively involved in creating and testing the
connectors. With contribution from more than 13,000 members, count of
connectors developed by MuleSoft community is increasing rapidly. As of today,
we have more than 65 connectors from the community. Some of the connectors to
mention are Twitter, Dropbox, Facebook, Google Calendar, Google Contacts,
GitHub, JIRA, LinkedIn, Yammer, Drupal, Paypal, Expedia and so on.
Easy connectivity with the specialized connector
All
ESB implementations (OSB, Tibco, IBM Websphere and …) provides connectivity to
different systems using most of the standard protocols. Whereas, Mulesoft
provides more than 180 connectors to
connect to various systems. Most of these connectors are specialized connectors
to connect to underlying systems through their exposed APIs. This result in
easy connectivity to those systems, less learning curve and saves the
development time for Mule applications.
To
put up my point, let me take you through the example of connecting to
Salesforce. You can connect to Salesforce using their exposed API as most of
the ESBs will do, or use salesforce connector available in Mulesoft. Let’s
discuss both the approaches.
Connecting to Salesforce through API:
Salesforce
has exposed their functionality with the set of APIs categorized as REST API,
SOAP API, Streaming API and Bulk API. This Salesforce API landscape is as vast
as the ocean. Once you could find the appropriate API and operation you need to
invoke, you need to learn about how to send the authentication token, what are
data formats (JSON, XML, CSV, and Custom) and which communication style (synchronous
and asynchronous) to use. Next step will be to configure ‘HTTP’ or ‘Web Service
Consumer’ component in your flow with required data transformations before and
after. Every time you need to call an operation, you must specify the name of the
operation, the method to be used (get/ post/ put …), name and type of
parameters (query, URI, form …). Please refer https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/modules/api_basics/units/api_basics_overview for further information.
Connecting to Salesforce through connector:
To connect
to Salesforce through a connector, add salesforce component in your flow.
Configure the connector with security information like username, password, and
security token. Select appropriate operation, provide data required to execute
the operation, and you are done with the configuration. The following picture
shows one example of a query operation.
Figure 4: Salesforce Connector Configuration
Summary
With
a set of out-of-the-box Anypoint connectors, you can connect to any application
hosted on-premises, in data centers or on the cloud. Instead of focusing on
building the adapters before you could build your integration solution, with MuleSoft
you can start building your integration solution with no time. Making use of
these inbuilt connectors, you are set free to concentrate on your integration
solution and improving your deliverable's quality and achieving your business
goals much faster.
