Artifact management and organization

Mule Galaxy^™ provides an array of artifact management capabilities, utilizing a "workspace" concept to organize configurations, policies, schemas or any other artifacts your application needs. This workspace design provides a flexible mechanism to manage your artifacts.

Easily view important artifact details

Galaxy stores and presents artifact details such as name, description, lifecycle phase, and version. Metadata is extracted from artifacts or supplied by the user. Galaxy comes with built in capabilities to recognize many different types of artifacts and can build this metadata for through indexes.

For example, if you add a Mule^® configuration to Galaxy it will extract the names of the Mule descriptors, the model name, the names of the custom transformers and other relevant details. This allows you to quickly see information about the artifact and makes the artifact easily searchable as you can query for any particular field. In addition to Mule configurations, Galaxy also has built in support for WSDL documents, XML Schemas, WS-Policy documents, and Spring configurations.

Metadata

While Galaxy can automatically index artifacts for you, you may also want to supply your own metadata specifics. You can easily define new properties, such as the group developing the artifact or the cluster the artifact is destined for.

Searching

Galaxy provides a set of sophisticated search capabilities. The structured search via the workspaces page allows you to query an artifact based on its name, description, and lifecycle phase. You can also search based on the metadata associated with the document - whether this is generated from an Index such as the WSDL Services index or a user-defined property.

Galaxy also supports an SQL-like syntax for search.

Lifecycle Management

Artifacts progress through lifecycles phases inside Galaxy. This helps users and administrators to make informed judgments about the state of the artifact and manage each stage of its lifecycle. For example, a QA team can look for artifacts inside the repository which are in the 'Developed' phase, perform the necessary testing on them and migrate them to the 'Tested' phase.

Dependency Management

Galaxy can automatically detect artifact dependencies. If you have a WSDL or Schema which contains imports, it will find these and link the artifacts together inside Galaxy. This allows users and administrators to easily see who else is consuming your services and plan for how changes will affect them.

Policy Enforcement

Galaxy allows you to implement governance rules across your organization. Policies can be applied globally or at the workspace level to artifact lifecycles. Galaxy includes several built in policies which can perform the following:

• Enforce WS-I Basic Profile compliance
• Require Mule configurations to only use SSL encrypted HTTP
• Enforce WSDL backward/forward compatability

And because Galaxy is open source, users can create their own policies unique to their organization.

Application Deployment Management (Mule NetBoot)

NetBoot is able to load applications remotely from the repository, making Galaxy the central source of truth as to which applications and versions are deployed. To upgrade or roll back to a previous version of an application or Mule distribution, the developer simply updates the application in the repository, and NetBoot dynamically loads both the application and the Mule distribution over the network.

Scripting Shell

Galaxy is highly customizable, allowing power users to write custom extensions, running periodically to perform tasks such as:

• Listening for lifecycle transition events and sending automated alerts
• Pruning old builds from a development instance
• Installing new custom policies

Activity Monitoring and Event API

An important aspect of governance is the logging of all relevant changes inside the registry. Activities such as lifecycle transitions, the addition of new artifacts, or the changing of metadata are all logged inside Galaxy. Changes and updates are easily viewable and searchable from the Activity tab allowing you to track what changes were made.

Additionally, these important activities can trigger an internal event, resulting in actions such as sending notifications or applying remote policies

Indexes

Galaxy is able to index your artifacts using XPath or XQuery (and soon Groovy!). It comes built in with several indexes for Mule configurations, WSDLs, XML Schemas, Spring configurations and more. Users can also create their own custom indexes. Through simple XPath or XQuery expressions you can extract useful information out of your artifact for searching and viewing later.

Atom Publishing Protocol API

Galaxy exposes its artifacts and workspaces through the RESTful Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). APP is a simple HTTP protocol for querying collections, accessing resources, and modifying them. Because APP is just HTTP it is extremely simple to integrate Galaxy with a large number of applications.

Integration with Mule, CXF, Spring

Governance requires integration with service components. Galaxy plugins for Mule, Apache CXF and Spring provide immediate results:

• Load and manage Mule ESB configurations
• Pull sets of bean definitions through a Spring application context
• Search sets of policies and apply them to Apache CXF services

And because Galaxy is open source, users can create their own integration plugins unique to their organization.

Federation Capabilities (Galaxy Enterprise Only)

Galaxy 1.5 Enterprise includes exclusive features enabling basic federation capabilities involving multiple instances of Galaxy:

• Remote Workspaces - attach remote workspaces to a local instance of Galaxy, allowing users to browse other Galaxy instances
• Replication - easily copy workspaces from one Galaxy instance to another, enabling additional lifecycle management capabilities (e.g., push production-worthy artifacts/entries from a development instance of Galaxy to a production instance)

Other Exclusive Features in Galaxy Enteprise

Galaxy Enterprise includes a number of additional features geared towards mission-critical enterprise deployments, including:

• Clustering for high availability and fault tolerance
• Extensible query engine for searching custom artifact types
• MS Office search support
• Integration of Mule NetBoot and Mule HQ for centralized application deployment management