1) The document describes a real-world loan broker application that uses Mule to integrate various systems and services. It involves a loan broker service receiving requests and coordinating responses from a credit agency, lender service, and banks.
2) Key components include a loan broker endpoint, credit agency gateway, lender gateway, and banking gateway. The loan broker coordinates the flow, transforming and routing messages between the systems.
3) Mule handles the integration using various transports like JMS, HTTP, VM, and SOAP. Components are defined that handle the message flow and data transformation between the different systems and formats.