Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Open Source

Integration-as-a-Service


Joining us today is Dave Rosenberg, co-founder of MuleSource, a company that develops open source infrastructure and integration software, focusing on assembly, rather than repetitive coding.

DDJ: Dave, we know what Software-as-a-Service is, but what is Integration-as-a-Service?

DR: MuleOnDemand is a SaaS offering. Typically SaaS or OnDemand offerings are siloed applications. Integration-as-a-Service is taking the functionality of system integration and putting it into the cloud, providing for data transport between the enterprise and SaaS applications or third parties. MuleOnDemand acts as the mediator between applications and data sources regardless of where they physically or virtually reside.

Users subscribe to IaaS as they would any other SaaS application.

DDJ: Can you describe for readers a typical scenario involving IaaS?

DR: An example scenario would be an e-commerce site that processes orders but has order fulfillment provided by a third-party fulfillment house.

In this case:

  • The order is taken from the retail site and logged internally.
  • The internal system sends order data to MuleOnDemand.
  • MuleOnDemand parses the order accordingly (for instance converting XML or switching from JMS message to CSV) and passes it on to the fulfillment house.
  • fulfillment can subscribe to a web service that manages the transactions from the retailer.

DDJ: Is IaaS an open source project? If so, why is this important?

DR: MuleOnDemand is built on top of Mule. We expect all the additional functionality to be built back into the core product. This is important as there are a broad spectrum of APIs and other access methods that can only be addressed by a user community. Our end-goal is to provide any-to-any integration.

DDJ: Is there a web site readers can go for more information?

DR: MuleOnDemand.com has the information about the product along with the Beta.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.