General concept of mule ESB/Data integration

Question

I'm wondering about the general concept about Mule and ESB: I've got an online store and a CRM. Every time someone orders something, I'd like to add this data into the CRM to the customers. Every time someone signes up for the newsletter or did not order yet, I'd like to haven this person in the leads.

For this .. do I need to create classes and objects in Mule? (Like a person or customer object)

Would it be good to have some business logic in Mule which decides where to put the new data?

Or would an ESB more do simple sync jobs - but in that case, I could simply use a ETL software and just skip the extra complexity of ESB, right?

Thank you very much

Chris

PS: My requirements would be: Connecting Magento with VTiger and Adempiere and PimCore. Mule needs to be able to decide which data to put where. (newsletter subscription = lead in vtiger, new product in pimcore should be kept in sync with Magento and Adempiere, an order can directly be inserted into VTiger, etc.

It seems to be most convenient to the the webservices - but not all functionality is covered with WS.

The tricky part seems to be a little bit of business logic within the interfaces which decides which flow to go. Therefore I think it might be better to create classes within Mule.

Answer 1

As I feel that you need a CRM kind of application which will interact with other systems and also you want the logic which will decide that which system the application should interact. I think all these you can do using mule esb. You just need to decide your application flows and then you can start integrating each element and hopefully you will get the desired application. Writing a java objects is needed if those features are not available in MULE ESB or any business logic which is not generic then you can call those classes from MULE.

Answer 2

After looking at your question one thing i can suggest is if internally in the business logic if you always have data in some common format that will be good.

Suppose you are getting data from 2 different sources and then in Mule ESB you can declare some POJO's which will convert your data to some common format and then you can write your business logic to play with data.

Mule ESB follows all the ESB principles and hence you can filter data easily with Mule and you can also use Routing components like : Choice and Scatter Gather which helps you to route data accordingly.