1.9Connector

Connectors are effectively adapters/SDKs for external systems.

Instead of manually writing:

POST https://salesforce.com/services/...
Authorization: Bearer ...

you configure the Salesforce connector and use:

Salesforce Query
Salesforce Create
Salesforce Update
Salesforce Upsert

Likewise there are connectors for things such as:

HTTP
Salesforce
Database
SFTP
Amazon S3
Kafka
JMS
Email
etc.

The Salesforce connector exposes Salesforce APIs through Mule operations. The current Salesforce Connector documentation includes operations such as query, create, update, upsert, Bulk API V2 jobs and many others.