How does RabbitMQ compare to Mule

Question

How does RabbitMQ compare to Mule, I am going to build an application using message oriented architecture and AMQP (RabbitMQ) provides everything i want, but i am perplexed with so many related technology choice and similar concepts like ESB. I am having a doubt if i am making a choice without considering other alternatives.

I am mostly clear that RabbitMQ is a message broker and it helps me in mediating message between producer and consumer (all forms or publish subscribe and i could understand how its used from real examples like twitter , or Facebook updates, etc)

What is Mule, if i could achieve what i do in RabbitMQ using mule, should i consider mule similar to RabbitMQ?

Does mule has a different objective than that of a message broker?

Does mule assumes that underlying it there is a message broker that delivers message to the appropriate mule listeners (i could easily write a listener in RabbitMQ)

Is mule a complete Java bases system ( The current experiment i did with RabbitMQ took me less than 30 Min to write a simple RPC Client Server with client as C# and Server as Java , will such things be done in Mule easily).

Answer 1

Mule is an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus). RabbitMQ is a message broker.

An ESB provides added layers atop of a message broker such as routing, transformations and business process management. It is a mediator between applications, integrating Web Services, REST endpoints, database connections, email and ftp servers - you name it. It is a high-level integration backbone which orchestrates interoperability within a network of applications that speak different protocols.

A message broker is a lower level component which enables you as a developer to relay raw messages between publishers and subscribers, typically between components of the same system but not always. It is used to enable asynchronous processing to keep response times low. Some tasks take longer to process and you don't want them to hold things up if they're not time-sensitive. Instead, post a message to a queue (as a publisher) and have a subscriber pick it up and process it "later".

Answer 2

Mule is a "higher level" service implemented with message broker. From the docs

The messaging backbone of the ESB is usually implemented using JMS, but any other message server implementation could be used

You can build an ESB with rabbit; however, you're going to be limited to sending byte[] packages, and you'll have to build your system out of messaging primitives like topics and queues. It might be a bit faster (based on absolutely no benchmarking, testing or data) because there are fewer layers of translation. Mule provides an abstraction on top of this, speaks a variety of transports, and can handle some routing logic.