Although not very specific to Mule, this post is a bit of a heads up to API users of Cornerstone and similar SaaS providers. It is becoming a very common API authentication design to use Session Tokens even though RESTful itself isn’t stateful. This design helps in avoiding to perform authentication checks for every request (which can create huge bottlenecks on Authentication Gateways).

The figure below enlists steps to a typical authentication in this design. In short, an initial request to authenticate will result in a response containing a session token and an expiry timestamp, which is then used in all subsequent requests until the token expires.

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Anypoint Studio, as we all know, is a MuleSoft’s customized version of Eclipse IDE. It comes well integrated with Anypoint Platform (CloudHub) Runtime Manager. It will be nice if we can also do version control from Anypoint Studio. MuleSoft’s documentation clearly explains how to use Subversion with Studio.

Issues with SVNKit and Authentication

Although very clearly explained, it didn’t work very well on Mac OS X 10.11.6. Anypoint Studio version used here is 6.2.3.

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When using a web service consumer, we’re unable to use a property (defined in a properties file) within WSDL Location field. It complains saying it should be a valid URL or be a file in the classpath. This suggests that Mule expects only a URL that it parses to pull necessary information and hence populate other fields including service, port and address.

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I thought a simple flat file to web service call would be very simple, but it just turned out not to be. Let’s still call it simple because in the end that’s all it is - we get all the data lines within a given CSV file sent over web.

Firstly, the file and it’s quirks

Depending upon various factors including the age of the host, where the host is (both geography and within a given IT environment), the operating system and software etc., the file is encoded. UTF-8 is the recommended encoding for HTML5 (and in turn the most common encoding for any web service calls). But given this is fairly new, most often than not we will find encoding to be different.

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After spending more than a decade contemplating whether to start a blog, it all happened over last weekend when I thought of setting up a Mule specific blog (for myself) that can also act as a website hosting similar posts from other Mule practitioners.

Technology today has become almost analogous to clothing. We are able to buy lots of it because they are cheap and affordable. It’s cost efficient to get rid of them and buy new ones when we stop liking the look of it. What is even better than clothing, is all the updates and upgrades are automatic while being free of cost.

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