LIFERAY PORTAL-MULE ESB

Pawan Modi
Senior R&D Engineer
Agenda

 Scope
 Objective
 ESB
 Case Study
 Topologies
 Accomplishment
 Investigation
Scope
Scope of this demo project is to assemble the information from
multiple sources & represent it on common interface.
LifeRay is a portal offers many good features & it also meets
our requirements.

Following are the modules expected in LifeRay Demo.

 Single Sigh-on.
 Role Management.
 ESB.
 Auditing.
 Jasper Reports.
Objective
Objective is to achieve communication between extremely different
applications & information source.

Application Integration is the biggest challenge for many enterprises. ESB is

probably the quickest and most cost-effective way to address this
challenge.

Goal is to innovate platform that integrate different applications &

provide simple communication & data exchange between them.

Multiple technologies are available in market.

 Rest
 ESB
Rest
REST is a simple interface transmits domain-specific data
over HTTP without an additional messaging layer such as
SOAP or session tracking via HTTP cookies.

Multiple REST framework are available in market

 WebDAV
 Restlet

Team decided to explore Restlet framework.

Rest Conti..
After going ahead with Rest, team found following limitations
with Rest.

 All critical resources in an application should be exposed as

URIs.
 Very much applicable for GET requests but unproven for
other state operations like complex operation eg PUT,
DELETE.

Decided to go for ESB instead of Rest.

ESB

Enterprise service bus provides foundational services for more

complex architectures via an event-driven and standards-
based messaging engine.

ESB enables the software connection running in parallel on

different platforms, written in different programming
languages and using different programming models.
ESB Conti..
ESB Conti..
Multiple ESB frameworks are available in market.
 Mule

 Service Mix

 WSO2

 IBM WebSphere

Decided to explore Servicemix & Mule ESB.

ServiceMix
ServiceMix combines the functionality of a Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) and an Event Driven Architecture (EDA) to
create an agile & enterprise ESB.

Following are the features of ServiceMix

 Completely based on JBI (Java Business Integration standard)
 Normalized messages based on XML.
 Best suited for working with BPEL, WSDL etc.
 Lacks security and breadth of connectivity.
ServiceMix Conti..
ServiceMix Limitations
Decided not to explore further on ServiceMix due to
following limitations.
 Only support Xml messages.
 Lack of security.

 ServiceMix is not light-weight framework.

Need to be explored more towards ServiceMix.

Mule
 Mule is a light-weight messaging framework that
contains a distributable object broker for managing
communication between applications.

 Mule can communicate over a whole range of

communication channels whereas ESB standardizes
on the notion of a message bus.
Why Mule??
Mule got following advantages on other ESBs.
 Scalable messaging framework that should handle
most of the complexities of system integration.

 Mule server can operate over complex topologies.

 Flexible configuration that should be easy to

manage over a distributed environment.
Mule Architecture
Mule Architecture Conti..
Case Study
Following are the main objectives
 Integrate Mule with LifeRay portal.
 Deploy LR-Mule on single common server.
 All communication must be redirected only via Mule server.
 Above requirement is important because communication via Mule server
aid in implementing single sign-on & monitoring security threats.

Mule is tried & tested in N-N, Bus & Star topology

Following slides share experience about N-N, Bus & Star
topologies.
N-N Topology
 In N-N topology, all nodes need to implement Mule
for communication.
 All node / application communicate with each other
via underlying Mule.

N-N Limitations
 N-N topology is not feasible to implement.

 Replication of Mule configuration in to multiple nodes is

not advisable.
N-N Topology Conti..

Node1 Node2 Node3

Mule Mule Mule

All network nodes need to implement Mule

Bus Topology

Bus topology is not meeting our 2nd objective.

 In Bus topology, communication among network
applications is not necessarily be via Mule server.
 Direct access make it difficult to implement single sign-
on.
 Direct access may also compromises with network
security.
Bus Topology Conti..

Node1

Node3 Node2 Mule Server

Node1/Node2/Node3 can access services from Node1/Node2/Node3

without going via Mule Server.
Star Topology
Mule is integrated in liferay portal & tested successfully in star
topology.

Centralised LR-Mule server is functioning well.

Single sign-on & centralised security server via Mule is yet to

be tried out.

Following slides shows Mule deployment in various star

topologies.
Star Topology Conti..

Mule Client1 Communication among

client1,client2, client3 is
via Mule server.

LifeRay-Mule
Server

Mule Client2 Mule Client3

Centralised LifeRay-Mule Server

Star Topology Conti..

AA

LR-Mule2
LR-Mule1

BB CC
B C

Two LifeRay-Mule network applications communicating with

each other.
Accomplishments
 Mule is successfully integrated & tested in LifeRay portal.

 LifeRay-Mule server is tested & working fine in star topologies.

 LifeRay-Mule server with multiple applications like JSP, portlets is tested & working
fine.

 Two LifeRay-Mule server networks, each with multiple applications are tested &
working fine.

 File transfer from Mule server to clients in star topology is tested successfully.

 Accessing information among multiple nodes in star topologies is tested & achieved
successfully.

 Redirection via mule server is functioning well in star topologies.

Investigation
 Single sign-on via Mule server is still in investigation.

 Mule security & authentication feature need to be

further explored.

 File transfer between mule-clients via mule server is

not yet achieved.
Centralised Setup

App1

LDAP
CAS
MULE

App2 App3

Single Sign-on & Centralised Security Implementation

Questions ?

Kindly send all your queries at the following id.

modipawan8126@gmail.com
Thank you!