In today’s complex digital landscape, businesses rely on multiple systems and applications to operate efficiently. However, these systems often operate in silos, leading to data inconsistencies and workflow disruptions. An integration tool such as MuleSoft bridges these gaps by seamlessly connecting different platforms, enabling smooth data flow, and enhancing overall productivity. Understanding the need for an integration tool is crucial for any organization aiming to streamline operations, improve data accuracy, and maintain a competitive edge. Before we dive into MuleSoft, let’s first understand why we need an integration tool and what low-code or no-code technologies are.

Introducing no-code and low-code technologies

Programming and software development have been evolving over the years. At first, programmers needed to manually translate the behavior they wanted into computer code. You needed to study a programming...

The term integration is still an abstract concept without seeing some examples of technology that can implement it; but don’t worry, we’ll get there. Let’s now switch gears and dive into another popular term we hear a lot nowadays: API.

If you’re a visual person, we encourage you to watch this video, https://youtu.be/s7wmiS2mSXY, from MuleSoft to see an animation with a restaurant analogy that is widely used to explain APIs. This step is optional, but it might help you understand this concept better. We will walk through the restaurant analogy in the following section.

Reviewing the restaurant analogy

When you go to a restaurant, after you sit down and get yourself comfortable, a server will come to ask for your order. You order your dish, the server writes it down, and then they proceed to communicate the order to the kitchen. The kitchen staff works their magic to cook your meal, and then let the server know when the meal is...

Everything comes together. After understanding all of the previous concepts – no-code/low-code technologies, integrations, and APIs – we can start talking about MuleSoft. In this section, we’ll describe what MuleSoft is, what some of its products are, how it’s useful, and how it is going to help you in your career as a Salesforce developer. First of all, MuleSoft is the name of the company that created the existing suite of products. When people talk about MuleSoft in a development context, they are referring to all of the products that this company has created. A clearer example of this can be seen now that Facebook has changed its name to Meta; we can more easily see the difference between the name of the company (Meta) and its corresponding products (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). The same is the case with MuleSoft. The name of the company is MuleSoft; it’s not the name of a product. But when we refer to MuleSoft, it encompasses...

This is where it all comes together. We understand that MuleSoft is a collection of low-code technologies that help us to create APIs or microservices based on Mule applications. Integrations are important because we can connect different services with different data types or structures to create an application network.

Understanding what application networks are

If computers are connected in a network, it’s called a computer network, such as in a computer lab and office network. Similarly, when applications are interconnected, it’s referred to as an application network.

Why do we create several APIs and connect them instead of creating one single system to do all of this? Remember the benefits of using APIs: loosely coupled, governance, discoverability, easier maintenance, efficiency, and reusability. We can’t achieve these with a regular system. All the code is tightly coupled, it&...

In this chapter, we learned how the learning curve for no-code or low-code technologies is smaller than learning a programming language. You mainly need to learn how to use the GUI, which may take some hours or days, and almost all the functionality is done through clicks instead of code.

When we have systems that need to exchange pieces of information, but they don’t necessarily use the same data type or data structure, we create integrations to help translate this data. Using APIs is better for the developers who create or maintain the code, the developers who want to use a public API, and the companies behind them. APIs, as opposed to other systems, are loosely coupled, easier to maintain, discoverable, and reusable.

MuleSoft’s main three products are Anypoint Platform, Anypoint Studio, and Composer. Anypoint Platform is a tool you can access from your browser to design, deploy, manage, secure, and monitor your APIs or applications. Anypoint Studio is...

Take a moment to answer the following questions to serve as a recap of what you just learned in this chapter:

1. What’s the difference between no-code and low-code technologies?
2. What are the API components we talked about in this chapter?
3. How do the API components relate to the API analogy we discussed?
4. What are the names of the three main MuleSoft products?
5. List some of the products or functionality that can be found inside those three main MuleSoft products.
6. What are the three phases we talked about when creating an API within MuleSoft?
7. What are the three API-led connectivity layers?
8. What purpose does each of the API-led connectivity layers serve?

1. The differences between no-code and low-code technologies are as follows:

   No-code technologies provide a user interface for you to use the product and don’t require you to learn or know any type of programming language in order to use it.

   Low-code technologies also provide a user interface, but they do involve some minor programming in order to create more personalized functionality. Although the use of the technology doesn’t revolve around the programming language, it is a part of it.

2. The API components are as follows:
   • Implementation: The body of the API, where all the information is processed
   • Request: The data you send to the API with detailed information
   • Response: The data you receive back from the API with detailed information about what happened with your request
   • API specification: The standard, or contract, so you know what you can ask for in the request and what you might receive in the response
3. The API components relate to the API analogy as follows...