Saddle 1.0 released
- Details
- Published on Monday, 12 November 2012 14:54
Today we officially release version 1.0 of Saddle.
Putting this release together cost us about one year, but now we have a version that fits the name "Saddle 1.0".
Users of our nightly builds may already know most of the improvements, but now here is a stable, tested and well documented package for all of those still running on Saddle 0.8.
Saddle 1.0 adds the following features to the previous version:
Refurbished graphical monitoring
Imagine you would have the possibility to monitor your Mule app like you designed it: View your integration workflow with all its elements and have statistics directly assigned to them.
Sure that would be great but not enough. Monitoring would also mean to be able to trace specific messages and receive a visual feedback about the way they took through the integration scheme along with displaying their payload in a structured form, their properties and attachments. Another interesting feature would be to know how and where these message contents have been altered in the course of the message processing.
Well, you don't need to stress your imagination anymore as this is now possible with the web-based Saddle monitoring for all Mule versions and editions no matter if your app has been created with Saddle, Mule Studio or manually. There is also another blog post describing this feature more in detail.
Rapid Prototyping
Saddle uses templates describing the structure of messages that should be handled. These templates allow a high degree of flexibility and can be created in a graphical drag and drop editor. Nevertheless this can become cumbersome for complex messages and that's where the Rapid Prototyper comes into play.
You simply provide a sample messages or an xml schema definition, Saddle analyzes its structure and automatically creates the corresponding template. Further info can be found in the documentation or this blog post.
Integrated Template Creation
In the past versions Template design and testing where placed in different tabs. Now, all steps, defining, generating, testing, and refining a message template take place in one intuitive environment where the tools can be freely arranged to ones taste.
Flow Support
Saddle is now able to handle also flow-based configurations for Mule 3.x. Saddle 0.8 only provided support for service-based configurations.
Support for all Mule Versions and Editions
Saddle 1.0 supports the community and enterprise editions of all Mule versions from 2.2 up to the current 3.3 release and is ready to be extended for new versions easily.
Saddle API for direct Integration into your Application
Mule is powerful but in certain situations you simply want to add connectivity to your application.
In this case an ESB might be overkill. That's why we created a library containing many important components of the Saddle Message Handling Layer. The Saddle API immediately adds to any Java application easy to use access to the message contents as well as the Saddle transformers and connectors (e.g. HL7) without the need of any ESB underneath. Learn about how to do that here.
Further, as the message handling layer has proven very useful to many users, we also created a plugin that allows using the Saddle components with Mule Studio. You might learn more about that in this blog post.
Upgrade to NetBeans 7.2 as the backend of Saddle
We upgraded the basis of Saddle, NetBeans, to version 7.2 which brings a faster framework and some nice new improvements in the code editing functionality that is used by the message mapper. For more information have a look at NetBeans' new and noteworthy page.
Usability
Many, many bugs have been fixed and countless little usability improvements like much faster Saddle start up, intuitive connector handling, advanced file import, or batch template testing have been implemented.
Like always, everything is published under a non-viral open source license and accompanied by an exhaustive documentation.
Virtually real time support is provided in the community forum and through different tutorials.
So visit the download page now and give Saddle 1.0 a try!