I have spoken to many of our customers who have written custom components and transports for Mule, said Ross Mason, CTO and co-founder of MuleSource. Often these extensions are not part of their core business, so hosting them on MuleForge means that these companies do not need to maintain this code and the Mule community can help fix and improve it.
Mason said MuleForge provides a platform where developers can explore, download, test and contribute to a range of re-usable Mule extensions, which he said can be used to reduce the effort required to complete an integration or SOA project.
He said that in accordance with the open source philosophy, the Mule community is encouraged to share non-business sensitive Mule extensions on MuleForge.
MuleForge already hosts over 40 projects from the MuleSource core development team and various other contributors, and includes a salesforce.com connector that enables developers to establish real-time communications between salesforce.com and internal data sources through a simple, configuration-based approach, according to MuleSource.
Other connectors such as SAP and AS/400 Data Queuing are already becoming Popular, while other extensions of note are the JavaSpaces integration package and a SIP (session initiation protocol) connector, which simplifies the use of Mule with VoIP and other telecoms applications.
MuleSource was founded in just 2006, but has quickly grown in popularity thanks to its open source Mule ESB. It’s backed by VC investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Morgenthaler Ventures, and is headquartered in San Francisco.
