So I’ve been using Mule for at least three years now. It says it’s an ESB, but I liked the description that I read (somewhere, can’t remember where) that said it was the “swiss-army knife” of integration.

Personally, I liken it to a dump truck. It’s not bells and whistles, and it doesn’t have a pretty UI. It just works, plain and simple. And it keeps working. Today I was able to do a proof of concept utilizing XMPP for presence and integration communication, and it took less than half an hour. There is no way I could have done that as quickly with some of the COTS tools I’ve used. Frankly, I would be hard pressed to get some tools to do that at all without major customization.