Finding the right architectural integration approach for one“™s business is becoming more important. One reason for this is the digitalisation. There are more and more devices like smartphones, IoT devices and gadgets but also applications and systems that communicate with each other. The power behind digitalisation is not a single technology or device. It is the network of systems, devices and people and the combination between technologies that promises huge benefits and new business models. The first, major step to gain these benefits is integration or: the integration of everything.

In integration of everything a combination of technologies will be found which is a mixture of classical approaches paired with other principles. Topics like device to process, process to device, streaming technologies, Big Data, API management, API monetization and much more are crossing classical integrational themes.

One huge challenge in these environments is to get a flexible and easy to adapt system architecture. Camunda BPM and Mulesoft’s Anypoint platform can provide such a system architecture.

During our monthly Opitz Consulting Community Day we started a project under the top name `Camunda meets Mule` to demonstrate how easy Camunda BPM and Mulesoft Anypoint can be combined. We started a demo project to demonstrate the API design features as well as the usefulness of connectors from Mulesoft. The processing layer is based on Camunda and is responsible for routing and business logic.

We started to think about a simple Use Case for our project that can be realised in a couple of hours. This resulted in a simple API, that allows sending messages via REST and JSON to Mule. Camunda starts a process to publish this information in Slack via Mule. Moreover, we wanted to approve messages, before they will be „live“.

Architectural Bird view

Here is an initial sketch we created during our initial discussion.

Different parts we created are described in the following blog posts:

• Handle REST requests in Mule ESB and forward it to Camunda BPM
• Approve messages in Camunda BPM with DMN and forward it via Camunda HTTP Connector
• Using the Mule Slack component

Our Team

And here is another picture of our group having fun during the project.

Feedback from some of my colleagues was…..

Dominik Bial, Lead of the Competence Center Internet of Things:

„I am still impressed, that it took us less than 4 hours from idea to our first prototype. Great frameworks and powerful combination!“

Erzen Hyko, Professional Developer:

„This project showed that Mule and Camunda can be very easily and fast combined together, providing a solid base for integrating APIs and model business processes.“

Alexander Rüsberg, Senior Consultant:

„Both frameworks provide a very fast and intuitive approach on integration without the usual ramp up and training effort that is necessary for most of their competitors.“

And finally my personal feedback on it:

„I“™m still working with Camunda BPM in several projects and had always to work with different integration layers. In most cases it is a mixture of multiple systems and thus more than one publisher teams. Some tools are very powerful and some of them need more communication to define an interface. The main advantage when you recap your integration layer to one software tool like Mulesoft Anypoint is, it increases your Time to Market due to the fact that you minimize and optimize the communication between the publishers and consumers. That“™s an important point for successful integration solutions.“