News

MuleSoft Platform Adds Mobile Connectivity Features

• By David Ramel
• January 23, 2015

MuleSoft Inc. this week upgraded its Anypoint Platform with new features to help developers connect apps with data and services through APIs.

With an existing focus on connecting apps, data and services via integration with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems, the platform received an upgrade that adds Anypoint Platform for Mobile.

"Businesses can now quickly design, build, manage and analyze APIs that connect mobile apps with Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Siebel and many other popular enterprise platforms and services," the company said in a statement. "Anypoint Platform enables them to share data with any audience, from any source, through apps that are highly available, scalable and secure."

The mobility features take an API approach to data and services connectivity for mobile apps, which MuleSoft said helps enterprises take a "bimodal" approach to software development, in which they must keep legacy systems chugging along while being able to quickly adopt new technology.

"An API-led approach allows businesses to tackle new problems presented by mobility, connecting data between departments, on-premises systems and the cloud," the company said. "APIs help unlock the data and assets by providing a layer of abstraction and control between the mission-critical legacy systems and the front-end being exposed to developers."

MuleSoft said the Anypoint Platform lets developers quickly build mockups and flesh out actual apps, create new APIs from scratch or from modular components from other sources and access data from back-end systems via data gateways.

Specific new features in the January 2015 release include:

• Anypoint Exchange, where users can publish templates and patterns for reuse in typical scenarios.
• New mobile development templates that help developers quickly implement APIs for data and service integration.
• Features for quicker development on the Microsoft .NET Framework, so developers can work with APIs from within the Visual Studio IDE or create ASP.NET Web API 2-compatible APIs from a RESTful API modeling language (RAML) definition.

Other features of the platform upgrade include better connectivity for RESTful HTTP services, secure connection improvements, additional support for Microsoft APIs, enhanced analytics capabilities and more.

MuleSoft said its platform addresses an underappreciated challenge to mobile app development initiatives: integration with other systems.

"Integration is an often-underestimated aspect of mobile application development projects," the company quoted research firm Gartner Inc. as saying. "A notable portion of an overall mobile app project cost -- as much as 70 percent in some cases -- can be attributed to integrating the mobile app with established enterprise applications, services and data sources, whether on-premises or in the cloud."

As part of the January release, MuleSoft also announced new versions of its runtime -- the Mule ESB 3.6 enterprise service bus -- and tooling, the Anypoint Studio.