Morning Java

When MuleForge first opened a couple of years ago I submitted a Maven Archetype for simple Mule applications. After the recent upgrade of MuleForge the project was suddenly not available anymore, still I regularly meet developers who show a keen interest in my archetype. So, I decided to upgrade it to Mule 2.0.* and post it here instead.

Basically, the Maven Mule Archetype creates a skeleton Mule Project with a runnable demo application inside. The idea is that by providing a simple Mule Project that demonstrates different aspects of Mule, new users will be able to do their own modifications and get up and running in no-time. The demo application is composed as described in the following figure:

The Project asks for input from System.in. The input is split into multiple messages where each word is sent as a separate message. This is handled by the Splitter attached to output of the ‘Gate.In' component. Each word is then capitalized by the CapitalizedUMO and then reversed by the ReverseUMO. The separate word messages are then aggregated into a single message by the Aggregator attached to the input of the ‘Gate.Out' component, and sent to System.out.

The CapitalizeUMO only accept messages containing lower-case a-z characters, which is enforced by the filter attached to the input of the UMO. Rejected messages are sent to System.err. The ReverseUMO will throw an exception if a received messages is a palindrome. The exception is intercepted and sent to System.err.

So, how to you use the Archetype? Well, first you need Maven 2 installed. If that is the case, the archetype itself has to be made available to Maven 2. First you download the archetype plugin JAR file to a directory of choice and then you enter the following commands:

cd <directory-of-choice-where-the-file-was-downloaded-to>
mvn install:install-file \
-DgroupId=no.jforce.mule \
-DartifactId=maven-mule-archetype \
-Dversion=0.3 \
-Dfile=maven-mule-archetype-0.3.jar \
-Dpackaging=maven-plugin

Having installed the archetype, the following command will generate a project for you inside the directory from where you’re running the command:

mvn archetype:create \
-DarchetypeGroupId=no.jforce.mule \
-DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-mule-archetype \
-DarchetypeVersion=0.3 \
-DgroupId=<your-groupId> \
-DartifactId=<your-artifactId> \
-Dversion=<your-version>

You should now have a project folder called <artifactId> with a generated Maven 2 project inside. Congratulations, you’re halfway there

The following step is now to create a project that is importable into Eclipse, IDEA, NetBeans etc. For this example I’ll stick with Eclipse. Enter the following commands to generate an Eclipse project:

cd <artifactId>
mvn eclipse:eclipse

This command will generate the Eclipse .project and .classpath files that now makes the project a valid Eclipse project. Startup eclipse and import this project into your Eclipse workspace using the File > Import > Existing Project action.

You will now have your brand new Mule-project listed inside Eclipse.

If this is the first time you generate Eclipse projects using Maven 2, you’ll get a lot of red flags (errors). This is because you need to tell Eclipse where your local Maven repository is. The project classpath refers to artifacts that lie inside this repository. Just setup an Eclipse Variable called M2_REPO and you’re good to go. The following reference will tell you how.

Now, open your project’s StartServer class and run it. This (hopefully) will start the Mule, inside Eclipse, and run your application. When started the application will prompt you for your name in the console window:

That’s it. Now you are running Mule inside Eclipse, like a normal Java-project. Enjoy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 7:29 and is filed under Java, Mule. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.