ESB IDE offers “round trip” editing

By Alan Earls

Traditionally, enterprise system bus (ESB) developers could laboriously hand code or they could adopt tools from vendors that could speed up the process but at a cost – the tools could themselves be complicated and they tended to obscure access to underlying code, limiting the nuances a developer could apply.

MuleSoft, a Bay Area software company has announced a new design product called Mule Studio, an Eclipse-based graphical design tool, which is said to support ESB design ”round-trip editing.” That means developers can design and edit the ESB application interchangeably in either the graphical tool or in XML.

Mateo Almenta-Reca, Director of Product Management at MuleSoft claims vendors such as TIBCO and IBM have provided tools that made it easier to get started but made long-term maintenance more difficult.  He suggests the MuleSoft tools allow developers to do a deep dive if they want, and make changes in the code.