MuleSource decides to bypass a 'check box' feature in its next-gen product

By Galen Gruman

June 1, 2009 05:08 AM ET

Comments

(0)

Top Stories

InfoWorld - 2009 InfoWorld CTO 25 AwardsRoss MasonCTOMuleSource

As a leader at a young company, MuleSource CTO Ross Mason is required to carefully focus limited development resources on products and features that truly make a difference. But that's easier said than done, especially as technologies take on a life of their own when adoption spreads.

One of the biggest decisions Mason faced in 2008 was whether to include UDDI support in the initial releases of its Mule Galaxy SOA registry. Although Mason remained confident that the world was moving away from UDDI, it is often a "check box feature" in the RFPs of organizations looking to adopt an SOA governance tool. So he gambled and instead chose to make a stand that this software category required a new, simpler architecture (namely, REST) -- despite feedback from some vocal customers that they would not deploy or purchase the product without UDDI functionality. Mason also brought on Dan Diephouse, creator of Apache Axis and today a vocal proponent of REST, to provide HTTP as a simpler alternative to the heavy-development-oriented SOAP communication protocols for calling SOA services.

Today, it seems that Mason's gamble paid off. Analysts and pundits are calling for the "death" of traditional top-down and heavyweight SOA approaches, such as those based on UDDI and SOAP. Eight months after Galaxy Enterprise's release, MuleSource the product has seen thousands of downloads, hundreds of deployments, and more than a dozen paying customers.

[ Discover how the lessons learned from the 2009 InfoWorld CTO 25 Award winners can help your IT efforts. ]

Comment Recommend Digg Twitter ShareThis

Email Print Send Feedback Reprints

Reprinted with permission from

For more enterprise computing news, visit Infoworld.com
Story copyright 2006 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Jump to comments

$firstKeyword

Additional Resources

WHITE PAPER

EFD vs. HDD - What You Need to Know

Enterprise flash drives provide a new Tier 0 storage layer capable of delivering high I/O performance at a very low latency. Proper use of EFDs in an Oracle environment can deliver increased performance compared to fibre channel drives. Read the recommendations for identification of the best DB components for EFDs.

WHITE PAPER

Gartner Research Report: Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers, 2009

The market for products to improve the delivery of application software over networks remains dynamic and innovative. Vendors focused on solving enterprises' most-pressing application problems have become the top players.

WHITE PAPER

Eight Criteria for Server Load Balancing

Server load balancers are a simple yet highly effective means to scale an application environment while ensuring its availability. Today's solutions should also address application performance and security. Read about the top eight criteria you should consider when choosing a server load balancer and how Citrix NetScaler meets those requirements.