MuleSoft from Start: A Beginner’s Guide — Session 1: MuleSoft Overview

Continuing our series from last week, this week’s session was focused on giving you an overview of the different MuleSoft products that you can use. It can be overwhelming when you’re getting started because there are just a bunch of different things! 🥴 But not to worry. In this session, you will (hopefully) get things clearer to understand the products AND the community 🤗

Just a reminder that the outline, the links, and some notes from the session have been added to the GitHub repository for you to follow through with what I’m doing in the video:

GitHub - alexandramartinez/mulesoft-from-start: Everything discussed in the Twitch live sessions…

You can find both recordings (the complete and the shorter one) at the end of the post.

Let’s go through a summary of what we learned in this session!

Anypoint Platform

You can create a free trial account on Anypoint Platform. It will last 30 days, BUT there’s a trick ✨ — you can keep creating free trial accounts with the same email, as long as you change the username with each new account 😎

Inside Anypoint Platform, we have different products:

• Anypoint Code Builder (STILL IN BETA VERSION!!!)
• Design Center — Mostly used to design API Specifications
• Exchange — MuleSoft’s “app store” where you can find connectors, fragments, examples, etc.
• DataGraph — MuleSoft’s product to use GraphQL.
• Access Management — Control users, organizations/business groups, permissions, identity providers, etc. Mostly used only by account admins.
• API Manager — Secure your APIs with security policies, manage contracts, add SLA tiers, etc.
• Runtime Manager — This is where your APIs are actually deployed and running in the cloud, using CloudHub (MuleSoft’s cloud).
• API Governance — Set standards for your different APIs.
• Visualizer — See architecture diagrams and overviews from your Mule applications.
• Monitoring — Monitor technical aspects of your apps, like CPU usage or errors.
• Secrets Manager — Keep passwords, keys, etc.

Anypoint Studio

Eclipse-based IDE to implement your Mule apps or APIs. You can also design your API Specifications from here, but I’d recommend you use Design Center instead (because of its useful UI).

Composer

We’re not gonna go through this product in this series of videos, but Composer is a helpful tool to create integrations in a no-code tool. You access it through your Salesforce enterprise account, and it is running MuleSoft underneath. You can learn more about Composer in this MuleSoft Meetup Group.

MuleSoft RPA

Robotic Process Automation. After Salesforce acquired ServiceTrace, this product became MuleSoft RPA. We’re not going through this product either because it is currently only available for Windows machines. However, you can go to twitch.tv/mulesoft_community and search for RPA videos. Like the following one.

DataWeave

DataWeave is MuleSoft’s programming language. If you’re already familiar with functional programming, you won’t have a hard time learning this language; but if you come from a different programming paradigm background (like OOP or structured), you might have more difficulties learning it. It is not impossible to learn! You just might have to change your mental process a little bit.

DataWeave also has its own set of products:

• The DataWeave extension for Visual Studio Code — check it out here.
• The DataWeave CLI — check it out here.
• The DataWeave Playground — check it out here.

Community

You are not alone in this journey! There is a whole community of MuleSoft developers and architects that want to see you shine 🌟

• MuleSoft Ambassadors — our top experts in the ecosystem. They are constantly creating content to help you learn more or help people in the community forums.
• MuleSoft Mentors — this is the first step towards becoming an Ambassador. You can apply yourself or nominate someone to become a mentor here.
• MuleSoft Help Center (or Forums) — you can ask any MuleSoft question here. Most of the people answering are people from the community!
• MuleSoft Meetups — community meetup groups to learn from other people working with MuleSoft. You can search for a chapter in your city or join any other chapter you’re interested in. Check them out here.

Recordings

Finally, here are the two recordings you can find about this session.

• The complete video on Twitch
• The edited/clean/shorter version on YouTube

Here you can find the shorter version from YouTube:

And here you can find the complete video from Twitch:

Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or just general feedback for me!