If you’re bringing anything into Salesforce you should just invest now into Mule, you will get your money’s worth and find a myriad of uses to build APIs between many other systems. Once you build a component you can easily reuse it as a building block to attach to another source/destination. This makes it easy to ramp up quickly and spread usage of Mule throughout your enterprise. A good value for medium to large companies, but probably cheaper to outsource your job to a consulting firm if you are smaller.
webMethods Trading Networks is an excellent choice for a business-to-business (B2B) gateway platform, for sending and receiving messages to/from external trading partner organizations. It excels at making it easy to define new interfaces and provides robust mechanisms for ensuring successful message delivery and processing through automatic retries. We also use it successfully for all our application-to-application (A2A) integration, which many would believe is beyond the scope of what webMethods Trading Network is good for; however, we have made it work and it has been very successful in our organization. I would not recommend using webMethods Trading Network for integration that requires low-latency or high-bandwidth data transfers. It is much better suited to shipping reasonable sized XML or JSON or flat file messages (less than 100 mb) around in situations that do not need sub-second latency. If you have low-latency or high-bandwidth needs, you should use a product more focussed on eventing, such as Kafka, for example.
It is best suited for Rest API development. Mule ESB uses RAML as an API descriptor which is less complex and easy to understand. RAML is an open standard majorly supported by Mulesoft. Once RAML is developed, it is very easy (a few clicks)to create flows corresponding to the resources defined in the RAML. One can also include JSON schema validation in RAML, and with the use of APIkit router, Mule ESB makes the request validation very easy (it's automatic basically.)
Mule ESB comes with a large spectrum of community and enterprise connectors. We have connectors for all the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, SAP, etc. This enables Mule ESB to integrate with the other systems in a faster and more robust way. Mule ESB has many components to fulfill the requirements of each integration (for example batch processing, parallel processing, choice, etc.)
Mule API gateway is one of the best tools (modules) of Mulesoft's offering. It supports API governance and management very well. One can easily enforce policies on their APIs with API gateway. It enables some of the must-have features in an API solution (i.e. throttling, oAuth, access levels, etc.)
Implementing a CI/CD (DevOps) environment for Mule ESB is a very easy task. Mule majorly uses MAVEN as its build tool, which in turn makes it best suitable for CI/CD approach. Mule also provides MAVEN plugins for auto deployments to the servers. Mule also has a best Unit testing module which is MUnit. MUnit can be used for both Unit and Functional testing, and it is easy to write and generates coverage reports in various formats.
