stillhacking

Not that long ago I began to read for review purposes the Mule ESB Cookbook.  I will start by saying I was a bit disappointed but there's certainly a possibility that my definition of a cookbook is a bit more picky that what the authors have in mind. I will say the book is generally well written and has source code references as one would expect.  When I compare the book to the documentation and examples from MuleSoft, I don't see a strong advantage with the cookbook. Generally speaking I like a cookbook to contain a recipe or two of a pattern I might want to create or something similar to it.  I don't expect to find a lot of getting started material or basic examples but then that's me.  To be fair, if you have no experience with Mule ESB (and you happen to be running Windows), this may well be a good "zero to mid-range-speed" how to guide.  For me it's a bit basic and if one is already familiar with Eclipse or an IDE which leverages Eclipse, there

I really do enjoy my job (for the most part) and staying current with technology, while certainly not totally attainable, is something I enjoying trying to achieve. SOA, NoSQL databases, new(ish) mobile development are a few of the technology spaces that grab my regular interest these days.  Every now and then something comes along that literally makes me fire off a positive email, tweet, blog entry, or comment to colleagues. I am very much aware of the future potential of cloud IDEs and codenvy is not something that's been off my radar.  A short while ago I got an email from codenvy that made me say "wow, now that's cool." Check it out...codenvy will now let you create an app, from a template, instantly, and without even signing in. They have built technology which creates an app, from a template, in a temporary workspace faster than some folks can get their favorite IDE to (fully) load.  In my case that may well depend upon how many projects I tend to leave

I just started reading Mule ESB Cookbook  from Packt Publishing.  If you're like me, the "cookbook" connotation brings to mind the idea that one can use the book when a good "recipe" is needed in this case for Mule ESB.  In my experience I find such a book useful when I am first learning a technology or perhaps if I have not used the technology for a particular use case.  In most such situations there's probably not an exact match for what I might need but if it's a good book, the various solutions should include one that's in the ballpark.  I will follow up this short entry with my impressions after I have completed the book. Until then, happy coding. Carl

If you poke around a bit on the MuleSoft site, it probably won't take you long to find a nice definition of an ESB along with a discussion of when you might want to use one.  There's a line in there somewhere which makes me chuckle (mostly because I think it's true more often than we care to admit) about folks choosing a technology before understanding what architecture is actually needed for their project.  My experience has shown me that this phenomenon is not limited to SOA or even IT for that matter but that's a topic for another day. Recently we were working on some proof-of-concept stuff in Mule and ran into some trouble getting the connector for Google calendars to work.  This suite  appears to be a comprehensive set of connectors which expose the Google Apps API to MuleStudio very nicely.  My guess is that a version mismatch is causing the unit tests and examples to fail for us but I cannot confirm that.  After a few hours of effort which was interesting but