Mule

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 not fruitful, I thought it might be worth trying to create a smaller connector using the MuleSoft DevKit.

The page I reference above provides a friendly suggestion about looking at the community-built connectors before creating one using the DevKit.  On the one hand I do believe it's generally not a good idea to reinvent the wheel but sometimes a better (or working) mousetrap needs to be created.  In this case there's also some pretty cool stuff to learn along the way.

In order to create Google Calendar events from Mule, I first downloaded a Java example program which, given the appropriate API authorization, included add, change, delete logic for calendars and associate events.

Next I used the DevKit to create a "skeleton" connector.  Once that was working, modifying it to include the Google Calendar API functionality was relatively easy to do albeit with limited functionality.  The current version of this effort is here.  I anticipate expanding this project to include additional functionality but in the meantime I hope it provides a bit of a start for someone or perhaps a bit of inspiration to explore Mule.

Carl

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