Mule explained in a nutshell

2.  Mule ESB is a lightweight Java-based enterprise service bus (ESB)
and integration platform that allows developers to connect applications
together quickly and easily, enabling them to exchange data. Mule
ESB enables easy integration of existing systems, regardless of the
different technologies that the applications use, including JMS, Web
Services, JDBC, HTTP, and more.It enriches the mule message by
calling external system or do some transformation to existing payload
and save it into some scope of variable like session or outbound or
invocation and the transformation happened in en-richer scope
doesn't affect the actual payload.

3.  The platform is Java-based, but can broker interactions between
other platforms such as .NET using web services or sockets..
 The architecture is a scalable, distributable object broker that can handle
interactions across legacy systems, in-house applications, and almost all
modern transports and protocols
 The key advantage of an ESB is that it allows different applications
to communicate with each other by acting as a transit system for
carrying data between applications within your enterprise or across
the Interne

4. Mule ESB includes powerful capabilities that include:
 Service creation and hosting — expose and host
reusable services, using Mule ESB as a lightweight
service container
 · Service mediation — shield services from message
formats and protocols, separate business logic from
messaging, and enable location-independent service
calls
 · Message routing — route, filter, aggregate, and re-
sequence messages based on content and rules
 · Data transformation — exchange data across
varying formats and transport protocols

5.  This is a very simple flow with one-way inbound and outbound
endpoints, and which acts as part of an order processing pipeline. This
flow uses an enricher to add a state flow variable to the current
message with the state that the flow ref returns. The ‘target’ attribute
defines how the current message is enriched using
a MessageEnricher which uses the same syntax as expression
evaluators.

6.  Design and Development Tools
 1. Anypoint Studio: An eclipse based graphical
development environment for designing, testing and
running Mule flows. It consists of two types of editors
for development: Visual editor and XML editor.
 2. Anypoint Enterprise Security: It is a suite of
security related features for secure access and
transactions to Mule applications.
 3. Mule Healthcare Toolkit: This kit is provided to
process HL7 standard messages used in Healthcare
organizations.
 4. Mule IDE (now deprecated), which is a set
of Eclipse plug-ins for developing, deploying and
managing Mule projects.

7.  Management Tools
 1. Mule Management Console: A user
interface which provides run time
management facility of deployment to the
Mule Repository and clusters.
 Mule has an integration engine, but the
community edition lacks the support for
Advanced Management interfaces. MuleSoft
offers an Enterprise Edition of Mule that
provides a management console, a Service
registry and higher availability.

8.  Cloudhub
 Cloudhub is Mulesoft's Cloud-based integration platform for
integration to connect apps, data and devices with integration
connectors (like one to Twitter, etc) platform as a service (iPaaS).
 Extension
 Mule covers a world of connectivity and message processing with its
rich offering of endpoints, transformers and routers.
 Connecting Endpoints
 With respect to connectivity, the array of endpoints covers the most
widely used communication mechanisms. We don’t stop there
however. These connecting endpoints have been extended with our
suite of cloud connectors, which allow you to exploit the exponential
growth in cloud based software and public APIs. Talking to the likes
of Salesforce, Twitter etc. is as simple as using any other endpoint
in a Mule flow.

9.  Transformers and Routers
 While our vast array of transformation and routing processors
satisfy the majority of use cases, our Java processors allow you
to implement your own custom integration logic. Likewise our
Scripting processors allow you to do the same in Mule
Expression Language, Groovy, Python, Ruby,
JavaScript,PHP and indeed any language which implements
the JSR-223 scripting spec for the JVM. These extension
capabilities multiply the power of Mule as an integration
platform, which is completely adaptable to the needs of the
integration project. Rather than constrain the developer, Mule
offers itself as a tool to solve every integration problem with its
wealth of out-of-the-box processors and its limitless extensibility.

10.  DevKit
 Mule’s powerful extension capability is made even easier with
the DevKit, which facilitates the encapsulation of complex
business processing logic or any complex interaction with external
systems or cloud APIs as a set of message processors which can
be presented on Mule Studio´s pallette as yet another out-of-the-
box flow building block.

11. Thank You All