It’s never been a better time to be a MuleSoft Developer. Anypoint Code Builder is here to stay.
Developers have at their reach the opportunity to code something that may change the world as we know it.
(Back in the ‘90s, the band R.E.M. used to sign in with a verse from one of their songs that goes like this: It’s the end of the world as we know it.)
When I started to work for Hewlett Packard (HP) back in 2000, one of my first assignments was at a telco company based in Monterrey, Mexico. My job there involved coding interfaces in Java to communicate between an in-house customer relationship management system (CRM) and INFRANET, a business relationship management system (BRM) which Oracle had acquired in the mid-2000s. I remember when I arrived in Monterrey that my manager had asked me to go to the local HP office to pick up my desktop — not a laptop — and take it to the customer office to work onsite. That desktop had a decent CPU and a fabulous 8GB of RAM and was equipped with a notepad application which I could use to type up my code. I ended up creating many Java classes which were able to translate extended markup language (XML) into structures called op-codes which the BRM could natively read. My life was easy, and writing code felt great in the notepad application. The desktop was working out well for me, although I needed to transport it every time we had a meeting or if we had to run my code to demonstrate something to the customer.
For many years, I used integrated development environment applications (IDEs) which required my laptop to have more RAM and CPU in order to have a better user experience. When cloud computing became prevalent, I had the opportunity to work with development tools which existed somewhere other than my laptop. My needs changed from requiring more CPU and RAM power to having a better internet connection. My first experience with a cloud computing-based development environment was AWS Cloud9.
Over the course of the past two decades, I transitioned from coding integration interfaces with Java in Notepad on a desktop computer to coding similar integrations in a web browser using a low-code platform in the cloud, such as with MuleSoft Composer:
What I had never experienced before from a cloud-based tool was the dual capability of building integrations with either low-code, form-guided tools in conjunction with full-blown code editing tools rivaling those of a desktop IDE — which is what I was delighted to find in MuleSoft Anypoint Code Builder.
The Eclipse-based Anypoint Studio desktop application is a great IDE — it offers you the full set of MuleSoft design and development capabilities along with the complete freedom to code in Java. With Anypoint Code Builder, we have something very similar in the cloud, and that is a very powerful thing.
As depicted here,
we can accomplish the following with Anypoint Code Builder:
- Design an API
- Implement an API
- Develop an integration
And this can all be done with the user experience of Visual Studio Code (VS Code), the IDE platform which it is based on:
I began this article with the bold statement that we developers have the means at our disposal to change the world as we know it. One way to do this is by designing and creating APIs with Anypoint Code Builder. All you need to get started is a browser, internet connectivity, and an Anypoint Platform account; and then you are ready to create APIs which may (or may not) impact the world.
Complete MuleSoft applications may be created with Anypoint Code Builder via its graphical flow builder:
and also via its XML editor:
The vertically scrolling view of the expanding flow in Anypoint Code Builder deviates quite a bit from Anypoint Studio’s classic horizontal flow representation, but frankly I quite like it better. Looking back to the good old days of business process execution language web services (WS-BPEL), tools like the OASIS WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People), presented the process flows with a vertical view:
Out of the box, Anypoint Code Builder ships with the following connectors:
Basically the essentials plus Salesforce and Oracle NetSuite. Pretty cool to be honest.
Now let’s take a look at the configuration for the Database connector. To import the Database Connector, press the “ctrl” key, followed by the “shift” key, and then finally the “p” key, and then you will be presented with a text box similar to the following:
Search first for “MuleSoft: Import Asset from Exchange”, and then “Database Connector”:
Once you have added it, you can then go into the text editor to autogenerate the configuration elements for a typical MySQL database connection. Type “data” and choose “db:mysql-config”
and it will auto-complete with the following XML:
Highlighted above in yellow is the “Test Connection” button. After the property placeholder variables have been specified, we can test a connection to the database. Ain’t that cool?
My first impression of using Anypoint Code Builder has been positive, and I really do feel that it will be a game changer for current and future developers. Those raised in the era of cloud computing will see it as the norm, while those more accustomed to using a desktop IDE will see it as an evolution.
