I recently joined MuleSoft and have had quite a few people ask me how they can get started with the platform.  These people typically have some integration experience on other technology stacks and are curious about the buzz that MuleSoft is creating in the industry.  Instead of copying and pasting from email to email I figured that I would put together a blog post that identifies some beneficial resources for learning Mule ESB.  I will try to keep this post up to date as new material emerges.

Mule Before getting started with any of the learning resources, you will need to download the Mule ESB platform.  MuleSoft provides a free community edition that allows you to build and run Mule Applications. 

In addition to a Community Edition (CE), a commercial product called Enterprise Edition (EE) also exists that provides some additional Enterprise features.

The Bits

Mule ESB Community Edition
– Free download of the community edition of the software including the Mule AnyPoint Studio IDE for developing interfaces for the Mule Platform.  These tools can be run on Windows, Mac and Linux.
 
Tutorials

First 30 Minutes with Mule – An introduction to the platform and simple walkthrough of your first Mule Application.

First Day with Mule – Some more concepts are introduced including Message States, Global Elements, Content Based Routing and Connector Tutorials.

First Week with Mule – Some more advanced concepts are introduced including Application Architecture, Security and Extending Mule.

 
Video Clips/Webcasts

Mule 101: Rapidly Connect Anything, AnywhereDiscover the MuleSoft’s Data Mapper, 120+ out of box connectors, development tools and deployment.

Mule 201: Develop and manage a hybrid integration application – Learn about Legacy Modernization, Service Orchestration and Connectors. Also learn to deploy your Mule Applications and Manage/Monitor them through the Mule Management Console.

MuleSoft’s YouTube Channel – Find a lot of short demonstrations and promotional material.  Demonstrations include SAP, SalesForce, Marketo, LinkedIn, Amazon S3, Hadoop, Netsuite, Twitter and many more.

 
Books 

These are the books that I have read.  I can confidently say that I learned something from each of them.

Mule ESB Cookbook – I started with this one and found some easy to follow, walk-throughs of common integration scenarios.

Getting Started with Mule Cloud Connect – This book focuses more on the Cloud and SaaS connectors.  It is a good read, but I would suggest getting some more fundamental learning taken care of first then dig into these topics.

Mule in Action Second Edition– This is the most comprehensive book of the 3.  It gets into a greater level of detail than the cookbook and walks you through some rich examples.

 
Blog Posts

Here are few walkthroughs that I put together as I began my Mule journey.

Exposing Simple REST Service – As the title suggests, a simple REST Service.

Exposing SQL Server Data as HTTP Endpoint – This post will demonstrate how to expose SQL Operations through HTTP and return responses in JSON format.

Exploring Mule ESB SFTP Adapter – Since I have used the SFTP adapter on other platforms I was curious to take a peek at MuleSoft’s solution.

Twitter Integration – A quick look at the MuleSoft Twitter connector that allows you to interact with the Twitter API in a very eloquent way.  In this example I update my Twitter status via Mule ESB.

 
.Net Resources

On this blog you will without doubt find a lot of Microsoft related content.  MuleSoft is a company that is driven to connect any system to any device on any platform.  With this in mind there are some activities in the pipeline to better support .Net and other Microsoft products/services like SharePoint, Dynamics, Azure etc.  With this in mind, I figured I would include a few links that may be of interest to people who are interesting in integrating Microsoft technologies.

Connect .NET to anything, anywhere  – Whitepaper

.NET Connectivity – Article 

In addition to what you will find in those articles here are some of the ways that Mule ESB integrates with Microsoft technologies.

Anypoint Connectors for Microsoft

  • MSMQ
  • AMQP
  • Active Directory
  • SOAP/WS-* (WCF interoperability)
  • REST (ASP.NET WebAPI interoperability)
  • SharePoint
  • SQL Server
  • Microsoft Dynamics GP
  • Dynamics CRM
  • Dynamics Online
  • Excel/CSV
  • Yammer

 

 

Lastly, I wanted to mention an upcoming event in San Francisco where you will be able to learn more about the .Net investments and other areas of focus for MuleSoft.  Click on the image below for more details.

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