Choosing a Transport

Communicating with an external service that uses low-level unsecured TCP connections? If so, use the TCP protocol.

Are you communicating with a flow or service always located in the same Mule application instance? If so, consider use the VM transport.

Is it important that messages be persisted until they can be processed? If so, consider using a persistent transport like JMS or File.

Are there advantages to a higher-level protocol built on top of TCP, for instance, the request-response features of HTTP, or the store-and-forward features of Email? If so, use the transport for that protocol instead.

Is performance the primary concern and it is not important that messages be delivered in the proper order or that the sender is notified if any are lost? If so, use the lighter-weight UDP transport instead.

Should messages be secured? If so, use the SSL transport.