Q1. What is MuleSoft?
Ans
MuleSoft is an integration platform that helps to connect devices, applications, and data. Integrating data to deliver a single view of the customer, automating business processes, and building connected experiences are done through Mulesoft. Mulesoft’s platform, which is called Anypoint Platform, comprises a number of tools for developing, managing, and testing application programming interfaces (APIs), which support such connections. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform is the world’s leading integration platform for Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS) as well.
Q2. What are the different tools and services offered by Mulesoft?
Ans
- API Designer: API Designer is a web-based tool that contains a console and a scripting notebook for JavaScript.
- API Manager: API Manager is a management tool that allows organizations in managing users, traffic, and service level agreements.
- Anypoint Studio: Anypoint Studio is a graphical design environment to build and edit APIs and integrations.
- API Portal: This is a portal that offers developers different kinds of documents, tutorials, and code snippets related to APIs.
- API Analytics: API Analytics is an analytics tool that allows a user to track the specifications of an API. This also includes its performance, usage, and reliability. Additionally, it offers a dashboard and charts.
Q3. What is endpoint in MuleSoft?
Ans
Endpoints basically include those components that trigger or initiate the processing in a working flow of Mule application. They are called Source in Anypoint Studio and Triggers in the Design Center of Mule. One important endpoint in Mule 4 is Scheduler component.
Q4. What is VM in MuleSoft?
Ans
Anypoint Connector for Virtual Machine (VM Connector) manages intra-app and inter-app communication through either transient or persistent asynchronous queues: Transient queues are faster than persistent queues, but they are not reliable if the system crashes. Persistent queues are slower but reliable.
Q5. What is Uri in Mule?
Ans
Mule Endpoint URIs are any valid URI and describe how to connect to the underlying transport. Most connectors in Mule can be created from an endpoint URI except where not enough connection information can be expressed clearly in a URI, such as JMS connection properties.
Q6. What is API proxy in Mulesoft?
Ans
API Manager automatically generates the proxy application when you configure your API as an endpoint with a proxy and includes an autodiscovery feature in the application. Mule locks the API until all policies have been applied. The client application (consumer) calls the proxy, which then forwards the call to the API.
Q7. What is inbound and outbound in Mulesoft?
Ans
A Mule Flow is typically divided into two parts: Source and Process. So, as the name suggests "Source" acts as message source for the mule flow. Hence, any endpoint present in the Source area would be inbound endpoint. Whereas, if an endpoint is placed in the Process area we call it Outbound endpoint.
Q8. What is autodiscovery in MuleSoft?
Ans
API Autodiscovery is a mechanism that manages an API from API Manager by pairing the deployed application to an API created on the platform. API Management includes tracking, enforcing policies if you apply any, and reporting API analytics.
Q9. What is API gateway in MuleSoft?
Ans
API gateway allows you to add a dedicated orchestration layer on top of your backend APIs and services to help you separate orchestration from implementation concerns.
Q10. What is Mule ESB?
Ans
Mule ESB stands for Mule Enterprise Service Bus. Mule ESB makes it easy for the development teams to flexibly connect, access, and exchange data easily. This means that even though the application is running into different VMs, the interactions between them are easy.
Following are some of the features of Mule ESB:
- Message Transformation Service
- Set of Service Container
- Web Service Security
- Message Routing Service
- Simple drag-and-drop graphical design
- Centralized monitoring and administration
Q11. What are the different types of messages in MuleSoft?
Ans
- Echo and Log message - These are used to log messages and move them from inbound to outbound routers. Inbound Routers means a single event is received via an endpoint and the router controls how and if this event gets routed into the system. Outbound routers mean once a message has been processed by a component an outbound router can be used to determine which components get the result event.
- Bridge Message - This is a passed message from inbound to outbound routers.
- Build Message - These are messages created from fixed or dynamic values.
Q12. What is a shared resource in Mule?
Ans
In Mule, shared resources are common resources that are exposed to all applications deployed under the same domain. Sharing resources allows different development teams to work in parallel.
For instance: Connector configurations could be made a reusable resource. These could be shared among all applications deployed.
These shared resources should be defined in the Mule Domain Project. These should then be referred to each of the projects that are meant to use the elements in it.
Q13. What are Connectors in Mule?
Ans
Connectors in Mule are Mule’s abstraction for sending and receiving data and interacting with various APIs. There are generally 2 forms of connectors in Mule:
- Transport: This is the most common form of connector used in Mule. Like HTTP, transports provide an adaptation layer for a protocol. These are the sources and sinks for data - to get data into and out of flows.
- Cloud connectors: These are typically used to interact with an API. Usually, cloud connectors don’t give endpoints. Instead, they have message processors that map to the operations provided in the API. The operations of an API are combined by these cloud connectors. The effect of this is that the initial friction for a developer is greatly reduced.
Q14. What is a runtime manager in Mule?
Ans
In Mule, a runtime manager is used for deploying and managing Mule applications. This is done on the Mule runtime engine where Mule runtime is running. We can deploy or pause the mule application by using runtime manager. We can also change the runtime version of the application at a given time. The worker size can be increased or decreased as well.
Q15. What is Worker in MuleSoft?
Ans
In Mulesoft, Worker is a dedicated instance of Mule hosted on AWS that is used to run the integration applications.
Following are some of the features of workers:
- Capacity: For the purpose of data processing, every worker has a given amount of capacity.
- Isolation: Isolation means that every worker runs in a separate container from every other application.
- Manageability: Manageability means that the deployment and management of each worker are done independently.
- Locality: In this feature, every worker runs and is located on a specific worker cloud.
Q16. What are Flow Processing Strategies and what are the different types of it?
Ans
How Mule implements message processing for a given flow is determined by a Flow Processing Strategy. All Mule flows have an implicit processing strategy which Mule applies automatically: either synchronous or queued-asynchronous. Each of these processing strategies is optimal for certain flows.
The different types of Flow Processing Strategies are:
- Synchronous Flow Processing Strategy.
- Asynchronous Flow Processing Strategy.
- Queued Flow Processing Strategy.
- Queued Asynchronous Flow Processing Strategy.
- Custom Processing Strategy.
- Thread Per Processing Strategy.
- Non-blocking Flow Processing Strategy
Q17. What is the difference between Flow and Subflow in mule?
Ans
| Flow |
Subflow |
| A private flow has its own strategy for exception handling. It also does not have a source defined. |
1. Although a sublow processes messages synchronously, it gets the strategy of processing and of exception handling from the calling flow. |
| Flows can have sources (such as HTTP Listener to receive a request) that trigger the flow execution. |
2. Subflows don’t have event sources. For example, you can’t place an HTTP Listener in subflow. |
| Referring flows gives a performance not as good as compared to subflows. |
3. Referring subflows gives better performance |
| Each flow can have its own error handling. |
4. Subflows don’t have an error handling. It inherits the error handling strategy from parent flow. |
Q18. What are some of the advantages of Mulesoft?
Ans
Mulesoft as an integration platform offers many advantages. Following are some of them:
- It is lightweight yet highly scalable. With Mulesoft, we can connect a large number of applications. For the communication to stay uninterrupted and consistent between the applications, ESB helps. Even though the protocols used for Virtual Machine are the same, building and maintaining communication between applications is allowed.
- Mulesoft can combine and connect over a large range of application network
- It has integration support for connecting various parts of the network.
- The components within the application are reusable. We can use pre-existing parts without having to write specific codes.
- As this is a vendor-neutral solution, many vendors can be integrated. Also, by minimizing the restrictions on vendors, the vendor dependencies are removed.
- For higher business support, it has great adaptability to change.
Q19. What are the configuration patterns provided by MuleSoft?
Ans
Configuration patterns have been designed for ease of use. The four configuration patterns that exist today make things that people do all the time simple, understandable, and fast to create.
Mulesoft provides the following configuration patterns:
- Bridge
- Validator
- WS proxy
- Simple service pattern
- HTTP proxy
Q20. What is the Mule Data Integrator?
Ans
Data Integrator is a data visualization mapping tool launched by Mule. It has support for Java objects, flat files, and XML Mapping.
The Mule Data Integrator tool provides drag and drop features to make the coding process easier, as it could be a challenging task for a developer to code complex mapping functionalities. This process of mapping gets support from eclipse to run the Data Integrator, which is part of the top layer applications in Mule Architecture. Data integration solves the problem of moving, transforming, and consolidating information from various parts of the enterprise. This enables it to undergo cleansing, standardizing, de-duplication, manipulation, and synchronization between sources.
Q21. What do you mean by SOAP and what are some of the advantages of it?
Ans
SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. It is used to exchange structured information in the implementation of web services in computer networks. The following are the advantages of SOAP:
- For a web service to talk with the client applications, SOAP is one of the best mediums that is developed
- It is a light-weight protocol. This allows applications to pass messages and data back and forth between disparate systems easily.
- It can be used for the interchange of data between various applications.
- The SOAP protocol can work with any programming language-based applications on Windows and Linux platforms.
- Web services built on the SOAP protocol do not require customization to work on the World Wide Web (WWW).
Q22. What are the parameters to configure a scheduler?
Ans
The Scheduler component in Mule helps us to trigger a flow when a time-based condition is met.
The parameters related to configuring a scheduler are as follows:
- Frequency: The Scheduler uses frequency to trigger flows.
- Start Delay: This signifies the time to wait before triggering a flow.
- Time Unit: This is the time unit for frequency and for Start Delay.
For example in some use cases where you need to do a specific task at a particular period of time or repeatedly at a fixed interval, your integration flow can be scheduled via Scheduler.