Mulesoft Process, System, and Experience APIs

Mulesoft is a core technology in many leading organizations. When designing a mule API,  one of the first things an engineer must do is decide what type of Mule API they are creating. Here there are three choices: 1.) Experience Api, 2.) Process Api, and 3.) System Api. An experience API is an API that is closest to the end user and deals with the customer experience, such as feeding data to a UI. A process API is the middle layer in which data is transformed according to the needs of the application. The system API is a pass-through proxy which does not alter the data coming from the original back end system. It serves as a gateway for rate-limiting and authorization to the source system. It is important to note that all of the APIs need not be implemented or used in a workflow.

Mulesoft, with its Anypoint exchange, allows organizations to open up their API ecosystems to everyone can see. Lots of times, there are many different organizational data silos, with the silos not talking to each other. Point to point integrations between the silos can be created, and this is typically what happens by a development team initially. But what happens when a third application needs access? A separate integration point is created. This occurs due to the lack of  knowledge of the initial API. The initial API was not designed with multiple consumers in mind. This is one of the benefits of anypoint exchange: an out-of-the-box discovery platform for APIs allowing APIs to be re-used and not re-created.

A look at Anypoint Exchange:

One of the pain points of developing Mulesoft APIs is the learning curve associate with Mule development. There are many training materials available, but I feel like completing the course https://training.mulesoft.com/course/development-fundamentals-mule4 is a must. Coming from a C#/Microsoft stack background, this course was especially helpful to get familiarized with the concepts and the AnypointStudio IDE.

A look at the Mulesoft Anypoint IDE (based off Eclipse):