Mulesoft Interview Questions

 1. What is a Mule?

Answer: Mule ESB is defined as a lightweight -based enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration platform which allows the developers to connect applications quickly, easily and efficiently. It is enabling them to exchange the data. Mule ESB also enables the easy integration of the existing systems, regardless of the different technologies that the applications are using which include the HTTP, Web Services, JMS, JDBC, and many more. know more at Mulesoft online training

2. What is ESB?
Answer: An enterprise service bus is defined as a software architecture for the middleware which helps in providing the fundamental services for the more complex architectures. For example, an ESB incorporates the features which are required for implementing a service-oriented architecture. In a general sense, an ESB can be thought of as a mechanism which manages the access to various applications and services for presenting a single, simple, and consistent interface for earned-users via Web- or forms-based client-side front ends.

3. What is Shared Context?
Answer: Context is defined as a temporary area which has been created along with the Service Message Object (SMO) in the Mediation Flows. Shared Context is a context present in the SMO. Shared Context is basically making use of the Aggregation process where we need to iterate the BO for certain times. It is used to maintain Aggregation data between Aggregation (Fan Out and Fan In) primitives. The Content that is present in the shared context BO does not persist across the Request and Response flows, i.e. the data in the Shared Context which is used in the Request flow cannot be used again in the Response flow.

4. What are Batch Jobs in Mule ESB?
Answer: A batch job is a job which is the top-level element in the Mule. It exists outside all flows of Mule. Batch jobs are splitting large messages into records. Mule processes these records asynchronously just as the flows process messages. Then the batch jobs are used to process the records.
A batch job contains one or more batch steps which, in turn, contains any number of message processors that are acting upon the records as they move through the batch job. During the batch processing you can make use of the record-level variables and MEL expressions for enriching, route or to act upon the records.

5. What is Transient Context?
Answer: It is the context which is used for passing values between the request flow, responses flow or Mediation primitives within the current flow. The transient context is not able to link the requests and responses and hence it cannot be used across. It is used when you are required to save an input message before a service is invoking a call. After the service’s invoke the call, the next primitive can be used to create another message by combining the original message. The service invokes responses which are stored in the transient context.

6. What are the different endpoints available in Mule ESB?
Answer: Different types of Endpoints that are available in Mule are HTTP, JMS, IMAP, SMTP, and AJAX.

7. What are Inbound endpoints and Outbound endpoints in Mule ESB?
Answer: Inbound endpoints are defined as the message sources (http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/Message+Sources), which as suggested by the name is where messages are created. They can be created on the basis of external events (like an incoming HTTP request or JMS message) or by polling (like files in a directory).
Outbound endpoints are defined as the endpoints as anything else you are able to see in a flow (except exception strategies) like message processors (http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/Message+Processors), which simply means that they do something with the message in-flight flow.

8. What is the difference between Mule Connectors and Transports Mule ESB?
Answer: Transports are targeted towards a way of transporting data, i.e. a protocol like HTTP or reading/writing files. These are also defined as the general concepts and the other party that is behind such as a data channel and can be anything, a party with whom data can be exchanged, pure data sink or an own company. know more at Mulesoft  training course
Connectors are used for specific APIs, e.g. those from.com or facebook. Usually choosing a connector also determines how the data will be get transferred in the end, e.g. HTTP.

9. What is the functionality of Fan-in and Fan-out?
Answer:
Fan-Out: We can use the Fan out primitive for firing the output terminal once (with the input message) or firing the output terminal multiple times. You can be using the Fan out in isolation or as part of a Fan-out and Fan in combination.
Fan-In: Fan In is always partnered with Fan-out in the same flow and acts as a decision point for when to continue for flow execution. It will receive a number of messages until a decision point is reached, at which the last message to be received is propagated to the output terminal. The Fan in primitive may only be used in combination with Fan-out.

10. What is the Difference between SDO and SMO?
Answer:
SDO: Service Data Object is simply defined as the representation of the Objects or variables.
SMO: The SMO model is defined as a pattern for using SDO Data Objects for representing the messages.

11. Why the Name Mule?
Answer: We should know that there is a lot of infrastructural work to be done before we can really start thinking about the implementation of any logic. So this infrastructural work is regarded or termed as “donkey work” as it is needed to be done for almost every project. A Mule is also simply referred to as a carrier of loading that is moving it from one place to another. The load here specialized in moving is our information of enterprise.

12. What are the different types of Flow Processing Strategies?
Answer: There are various types of Flow Processing Strategies and they are as follows:

1. Asynchronous Flow Processing Strategy.
2. Custom Processing Strategy.
3. Thread Per Processing Strategy.
4. Queued Asynchronous Flow Processing Strategy.
5. Synchronous Flow Processing Strategy.
6. Non-blocking Flow Processing Strategy.
7. Queued Flow Processing Strategy.

13. What Are Available Esbs Apart From Mule?
Answer: The available Esbs apart from Mule are the entire major JEE vendors (BEA, IBM, Oracle, Sun) which are having an ESB in their catalog. It unremarkably has its basis on their middleware technologies and is generally the core of a much broader SOA product suite. There are also some of the commercial ESBs that have been built by the vendors not in the field of JEE application servers but like the ones from IONA Technologies, Progress Software, and Software AG.

14. Why is Mulesoft preferred than other ESB implementations?
Answer: Mule is referred to as lightweight but highly scalable which allows you to start small and connect more applications over the time. The ESB is capable of managing all the interactions between the applications and components transparently, regardless of whether they are existing in the same virtual machine or over the Internet regardless of the underlying transport protocol which is getting used. know more at Mulesoft training
Several commercial ESB implementations are used for providing the limited functionality or built on the top of an existing application server or messaging server, locking you into that specific vendor. Mule is vendor-neutral. So different vendor implementations can be plugged into it. You are never getting locked into a specific vendor when you are making use of the Mule.

15. What Is Filter In Mule?
Answer: Filters are defined as a powerful complement to the routers. Filters are providing the brains to routers needed for making the smart decisions about what to do with messages in transit. Some filters go as far as deeply analyzing the message content for a particular value on which their outcome will usually be based.

16. Name the different types of Web services?
Answer: There are basically two types of web services which are as follows:

• SOAP web services.
• RESTful web services.

17. What is the difference between Stop and fail?
Answer:
Stop: Stop is used to stop a particular path in the flow, without generating an exception.
Fail: It is used to generate a failure in the flow.

18. How to add classes/jars to the Mule classpath?
Answer: By making use of the MULE_LIB variable (generally set in the run script).
To include JAR file(s) in a mule classpath, declare each dependent jar file in the MULE_LIB entry.

19. What is Mule Data Integrator?
Answer: Mule has released a data integrator tool; it is referred to as a visual mapping tool which supports XML mappings, flat-file, java object, etc. Coding complex mappings are the mappings that can be very tedious and additionally difficult for maintaining, the mule data integrator with the help of the drag and drop facilities makes the building and maintaining of the mappings very simple and easy.
The mapping is done in the eclipse (plugins are required) and getting executed on a data integrator runtime which sits on the top of Mule ESB – this is a required license.

20. What is a Mule UMO?
Answer: A Mule UMO is referred to as a Universal Message Object.
UMO is now a legacy term. These are the Components which are now termed or referred to as Service Components.

21. Why does a mule won’t start? Check your Environment?
Answer: The java and mule environment variables must be set up correctly for a mule to start. If you experience the problems then check the following variables:
MULE_HOME – must be the location of the installation of mule.
JAVA_HOME – must be the location of the JDK.
PATH – must be having both JAVA_HOME\bin and MULE_HOME\bin in the path.
One should be checking all of the above requirements carefully. Some systems with the multiple JDK installed can end up with incorrect mappings between the JAVA_HOME and PATH, which will stop the mule from loading.

22. Is MuleSoft an open source?
Answer: MuleSoft is an open source technology and it is also providing open source SOA middleware and related products.

23. Why do we need ESB?
Answer: ESB, a middleware technology, is a Bus-like architecture used for the integration of the heterogeneous systems. In ESB, each application is independent and yet able to communicate with other systems. It is thus, preventing the scalability issues and ensuring that the communication is happening only through it.

24. What are Web Services?
Answer: Web service refers to functionality or a small piece of the program in any of the programming languages that can be accessed over the HTTP. Message format can be JSON or XML or any other type of the program as long as the other programs are able understand and communicate.
A Web service can be of synchronous or asynchronous type. Any web service having a server-client relationship can have multiple clients.

25. What is the way of creating and consuming SOAP service in Mule?
Answer: Creating SOAP Service – We can be able to create a SOAP service the same way we can create a Mule Project With RAML, the only change in this is instead of RAML we need to importe Concert WSDL. Consuming SOAP Service – We can be using Web Service Consumer or CXF components in our mule flow for accessing/consuming the SOAP service.

26. What would you consider your technical specialty?
Answer: According to professional Answers Preview one should say that “Computing and the Network Communications has always been a really strong area or field for me. I am having a big interest in how network communication is improving our daily lives and also our overall business efficiency. I see that you are looking for team members who are experts in network communications which is why it really caught my eye when I first saw your job posting.” “I have been focusing on my career on becoming a specialist of cloud integration although I do have the cross-platform app development expertise as well.” know more at Mulesoft online training from India

27. What is the MuleSoftAnypoint platform used for?
Answer: MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform of integration products is designed for tying together software as a service (SaaS) and on-premises software.

28. What is the use of Web service?
Answer: Web services are the XML-based information exchanging systems that make use of the Internet for the direct application-to-application interaction. These systems can include the objects, documents, programs or messages.

29. What is Mulesoft used for?
Answer: Mulesoft is an integration platform that is allowing the developers to connect the applications together quickly and easily which also enables them to exchange the data.

30. Is Mulesoft a middleware?
Answer: Mule Enterprise Service Bus is defined as a middleware technology which is quickly, easily, and securely connected to the enterprise. Unlike the typical middleware software, Mule as an ESB is defined as a Java-based middleware solution which is easy for using and easy for scaling. A web service is defined as a collection of open protocols and standards used for exchanging data between applications or systems.