Customer Reviews

Mule in Action

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4 star:		(1)
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Nobody has reviewed Mule in Action so let me be the first. Overall I can recommend this book for an engineer tasked with implementing an integration project using Mule. It will save you a ton of time getting comfortable assembling the many moving parts of this beast. That is, as long as you are already comfortable with JMS, web services or whatever other technology stack you're messing with.

The subject matter is obviously very dry, but the authors do a fine job of presenting the material in a readable, but very technically accurate way. They use the case study of a fictional solution as service outfit called Clood, to illustrate scenarios in a more concrete way. This technique is effective, although an appendix with an overall description of Clood's requirements and design would have been helpful.

I'm giving this a 4 because of what it lacks: a deeper introductory section. The concept level overview is fine, but after that, there needs to be a breadth first tutorial outlining how to start up and implement a simple, but non-trivial example application. A scenario that reads data from a file, passes through a transformer, a filter, and then route to a couple of outbound endpoints (JMS and WS perhaps) would have really broken the ice for me. As written, you go directly from deploying a pre-made echo sample that ships with mule, to the nitty-gritty sections cataloging the connectors, routers, transformers, etc. I found myself bouncing all over the book trying to implement a simple, but non-trivial example. But maybe that's just my learning style talking, which tends to be impatient.

Before you buy this book make sure you understand that the book covers Mule 2 and Mule 3 is now out. That means that many (most?) of the examples are dated and show less than optimal practices.

The book covers a lot of material but one might say that it is at the tactical level without any sense of the strategic. How do I strap together a system? Yes, I need to know how the transformers, routers, and transports work and the book does an adequate job of explaining those. But in a very real sense that is reference material. You learn the basic idea of it but unless you are using XMPP why would you read the detail of it? It's good that it's there when you want it to know how it works specifically.

But there wasn't the sense of epiphany one wants from such material -- "aha! I see. I get how this all works together."