Master your skillset – Anypoint Exchange

Last Updated on 30/05/2021 by Patryk Bandurski

Recently I was challenged by the survey for the Trailblazer profile. I was thinking about the beginning of the journey of becoming an Integration Developer. What I did to become successful in my day to day job and what I am doing now. As a result, I have decided to share my insight here. First, I will focus on Anypoint Exchange and some new assets that are available there for a while now. Enjoy!

Anypoint Exchange

In many technologies, you may find some common repository or a marketplace. You can look there for useful content, examples, plugins, etc. For example, Salesforce has something called AppExchange. Users can find there custom cool applications and services.

Anypoint Platform is the same. It has Anypoint Exchange. It is a marketplace where you can find templates, examples, Mule connectors and many more.

I used this a lot, during my first years of getting to know Mule better. Documentation and blog posts deliver great value but sometimes they are too rough. I like to work on examples. A picture is worth a thousand words. For me, the picture is a good working example from Anypoint Exchange. The example I can work on and familiarize myself with the concept by making my hands dirty.

A picture is worth a thousand words. For me, the picture is a good working example from Anypoint Exchange.

I value the Anypoint Exchange for being an up-to-date repository and constant evolution of assets. In other words, more new content appearing is what I like the most.

As I mentioned earlier it contains examples, templates and new content related to MuleSoft Catalyst. In the next subchapters, I will focus on them.

MuleSoft Catalyst – ready to use projects

On Anypoint Exchange you can find four projects that can speed up your project or give you a good insight into good developing practices. You can find four accelerators for:

• retail,
• banking,
• healthcare,
• Salesforce commerce cloud. Available from 3rd quarter 2019.

According to MuleSoft, usage of those accelerators can result is 3x faster project delivery. Let’s see how is that possible. I will focus on one asset that is Accelerator for retail.

Accelerator for retail

3x faster project delivery

The accelerator has a diagram attached depicting MuleSoft API-led architecture – like in the picture below. You will notice what systems are collaborating, what services are in the middle and end users/applications.

This is a use case that can be fully customized to your actual needs. What I found really impressive is that all APIs and applications are available to download and use. For each layer you have assets like:

• RAML definitions of APIs
• Implementation in both Mule 3 and Mule 4

When you take a look at RAML definitions you can find a lot of good practices and how to professionally design the API. You can take a look at library usage and custom types definitions. In the picture below you can find API from the process layer.

When you design your API you always design custom types. You can validate how certain types have been modeled and reuse them in your Canonical Data Model or Bounded Context Model. What is more, you can find some rules on how to do it in RAML in a consistent and flexible way.

Below you can find a case from the Retails Customer Library. It has defined a couple of types that are around the Customer concept. As you can see it uses other libraries as well – common and payment.

You can greatly fasten the speed of delivery of the service when you can reuse such a model. Just, go there and play with defined content.

Apart from that, we may as well download the application implementation. It is a good way to see what are the good practices to structure your code. BTW Joshua Erney has written an interesting article about project structure – that is available here.

Templates & Examples

Another very useful categories of assets are Templates and Examples. You may find there plenty of samples on how to solve specific use cases. It has a lot regarding

• connecting with Salesforce
• applications written in Flow Designer
• using connectors

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I can’t count, how many of them I have downloaded the assets in order to see how to do something. These assets were useful not only when I had started learning Mule but also before I was doing Integration Professional exam and sometimes in my day to day work.

Summary

Assets on Anypoint Exchange are helpful not only for beginners but also for Mule integration professionals. You may find there a lot of good content that can be reused or be an inspiration for your own code. It is as well a valuable resource to visit before taking the Integration PRofessional examination.

If you have any your favorite assets post it here 🙂 let’s share what is the best to look at. Feel free to leave a comment with your point of view on Anypoint Exchange.