PHP and ESB (with Mule) (ESB: Enterprise Service Bus)

Question

Where, when and why did you use ESB in a PHP-project?

Where, when and why do you think that it would make sense to use ESB in a PHP-project?

Does ESB (and ESB-facilitators like Mule) do provide any capability PHP and native LAMP-technologies are lacking?

Edit

My motivation for this question is stemming from my assumption that you actually never really need Mule. Mule will facilitate communication with external services which you could handle without mule. At the end of the day also Mule will create costs and overhead. So my question is steering at having somebody tell me about scenarios where you really benefit of ESB and tools like Mule or to second my guess with solid knowledge.

Edit 2

regarding Houcem's reply to my comment to his post ... what would be a native LAMP-answer to ESB/Mule?

Edit 3

Seems like Tuxedo might be a more PHP-native alternative to Mule/ESB. Somebody got experience using this tool?

Answer 1

ESB could be used in different ways :

• Providing asynchronous processing : Example : If you have a web site that does a lot of emailing .. and sending an email takes a lot of time which may block the execution of your page : you may use an ESB to send the email data to Mule and route it to an Email outbound channel, this way you can say that you have implemented a mail message queue. Another form of asynchronous processing : using mule to execute php scripts (using command line) in a non blocking way.

• Integration with java applications : You can send Messages to mule using php and implement some java business using mule API in java, php messages will be received by your java business components. This is used in big web sites which does a lot of complex processing and need flexible and powerful language like java.

What you need to know : ESB should be used like a Bus which means collecting data from heterogenous environments in a standard form (Mule messages) .. do business logic and then output data (after routing) to different environment

There is no native php integration with Mule in PHP world. To do it you should use web services (SOAP)