What does it mean by "Mule is a highly distributed object broker"? Mule and Camel

Question

I am trying to get a clear definition of Mule esb and have read a few places Mule is a messaging framework and a "highly distributed object broker".

What does it mean by that its an object broker? Is it that it can expose services over a network? Is camel an object broker too, or just a messaging framework? Can you expose services over a network with camel without a container? Is that what differentiates them?

Answer 1

This was the original tagline of Mule, way before Gartner has popularized the ESB term.

At this time (2005), Mule was built around the notion of Universal Message Objects (UMOs) and, as such, was positioning itself to become a scalable, distributed container for these UMOs. Hence the "highly distributed object broker" terminology.

After time, the object container aspect of Mule has become less important than its pure integration capacities.

Moreover, it's harder to sell an "object broker" to a C-level executive than an ESB. So this whole terminology has now been brought back in the shadow of history.