Mulesoft Interview Questions and Answers

• API Designer: API Designer is a web-based tool that contains a console and a scripting notebook for JavaScript.
• API Manager: API Manager is a management tool that allows organizations in managing users, traffic, and service level agreements.
• Anypoint Studio: Anypoint Studio is a graphical design environment to build and edit APIs and integrations.
• API Portal: This is a portal that offers developers different kinds of documents, tutorials, and code snippets related to APIs.
• API Analytics: API Analytics is an analytics tool that allows a user to track the specifications of an API. This also includes its performance, usage, and reliability. Additionally, it offers a dashboard and charts.

• Echo and Log message - These are used to log messages and move them from inbound to outbound routers. Inbound Routers means a single event is received via an endpoint and the router controls how and if this event gets routed into the system. Outbound routers mean once a message has been processed by a component an outbound router can be used to determine which components get the result event.
• Bridge Message - This is a passed message from inbound to outbound routers.
• Build Message - These are messages created from fixed or dynamic values.

In Mule, shared resources are common resources that are exposed to all applications deployed under the same domain. Sharing resources allows different development teams to work in parallel. 

For instance: Connector configurations could be made a reusable resource. These could be shared among all applications deployed.

These shared resources should be defined in the Mule Domain Project. These should then be referred to each of the projects that are meant to use the elements in it. 

Connectors in Mule are Mule’s abstraction for sending and receiving data and interacting with various APIs. There are generally 2 forms of connectors in Mule: 

• Transport: This is the most common form of connector used in Mule. Like HTTP, transports provide an adaptation layer for a protocol. These are the sources and sinks for data - to get data into and out of flows.
• Cloud connectors: These are typically used to interact with an API. Usually, cloud connectors don’t give endpoints. Instead, they have message processors that map to the operations provided in the API. The operations of an API are combined by these cloud connectors. The effect of this is that the initial friction for a developer is greatly reduced.

In Mule, a runtime manager is used for deploying and managing Mule applications. This is done on the Mule runtime engine where Mule runtime is running. We can deploy or pause the mule application by using runtime manager. We can also change the runtime version of the application at a given time. The worker size can be increased or decreased as well.

In Mulesoft, Worker is a dedicated instance of Mule hosted on AWS that is used to run the integration applications.

Following are some of the features of workers:

• Capacity: For the purpose of data processing, every worker has a given amount of capacity.
• Isolation: Isolation means that every worker runs in a separate container from every other application.
• Manageability: Manageability means that the deployment and management of each worker are done independently.
• Locality: In this feature, every worker runs and is located on a specific worker cloud. 

Mulesoft as an integration platform offers many advantages. Following are some of them:

• It is lightweight yet highly scalable. With Mulesoft, we can connect a large number of applications. For the communication to stay uninterrupted and consistent between the applications, ESB helps. Even though the protocols used for Virtual Machine are the same, building and maintaining communication between applications is allowed.
• Mulesoft can combine and connect over a large range of application network
• It has integration support for connecting various parts of the network.
• The components within the application are reusable. We can use pre-existing parts without having to write specific codes.
• As this is a vendor-neutral solution, many vendors can be integrated. Also, by minimizing the restrictions on vendors, the vendor dependencies are removed.
• For higher business support, it has great adaptability to change.

Configuration patterns have been designed for ease of use. The four configuration patterns that exist today make things that people do all the time simple, understandable, and fast to create.

Mulesoft provides the following configuration patterns:

• Bridge
• Validator
• WS proxy
• Simple service pattern
• HTTP proxy

Data Integrator is a data visualization mapping tool launched by Mule. It has support for Java objects, flat files, and XML Mapping.

The Mule Data Integrator tool provides drag and drop features to make the coding process easier, as it could be a challenging task for a developer to code complex mapping functionalities. This process of mapping gets support from eclipse to run the Data Integrator, which is part of the top layer applications in Mule Architecture. Data integration solves the problem of moving, transforming, and consolidating information from various parts of the enterprise. This enables it to undergo cleansing, standardizing, de-duplication, manipulation, and synchronization between sources.

SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. It is used to exchange structured information in the implementation of web services in computer networks. The following are the advantages of SOAP:

• For a web service to talk with the client applications, SOAP is one of the best mediums that is developed
• It is a light-weight protocol. This allows applications to pass messages and data back and forth between disparate systems easily.
• It can be used for the interchange of data between various applications.
• The SOAP protocol can work with any programming language-based applications on Windows and Linux platforms.
• Web services built on the SOAP protocol do not require customization to work on the World Wide Web (WWW).

The Scheduler component in Mule helps us to trigger a flow when a time-based condition is met. 

The parameters related to configuring a scheduler are as follows:

• Frequency: The Scheduler uses frequency to trigger flows.
• Start Delay: This signifies the time to wait before triggering a flow.
• Time Unit: This is the time unit for frequency and for Start Delay.

For example in some use cases where you need to do a specific task at a particular period of time or repeatedly at a fixed interval, your integration flow can be scheduled via Scheduler.