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 standalone 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.

“It’s the backbone for all the integration for all the Web platforms that LeapFrog has,” said Ciurana. “LeapFrog is planning to do over 10 different Web sites and Web applications, and the Mule ESB ties all of them together across different environments and different countries, and it also ties [to] our third-party service providers,” Ciurana said.

Saturn, meanwhile, can track transactions that go through Mule. It works with Version 1.5 of the enterprise ESB. Saturn is a BAM tool for business processes and workflow. It complements SOA infrastructure by providing detailed logging and reporting on transactions.

To provide visibility into transaction flows, developers and operations staff can drill down on transaction details and set message-level breakpoints for deep log analytics, according to MuleSource.

Other features of Saturn include process visualization, root-cause analysis, and reporting on service-level agreements.

Other companies, such as Iona, also have offered open source ESB technology. The open source ESB market, Rosenberg said, has made ESB more accessible by lowering the barrier to entry.

LeapFrog has found that, even though it must pay for support for open source software, it still saves money on it compared to commercial software. The company last year spent almost US$400,000 in open source subscriptions, but this figure would have risen to $1.6 million if commercial licenses were required, he said.

Support for open source software also is superior to support on commercial software, Ciurana said. “That’s the only way these guys can make money. They tend to be more customer oriented,” he said.

Mule 1.5 Enterprise and the beta version of Saturn are available Tuesday. Mule 1.5 prices start at $7,000 per year. Galaxy 1.0 Community, the untested version, will be offered Tuesday at no cost. The supported Galaxy 1.0 Enterprise product expected in the second quarter will feature subscription support, but no price has been set yet.