In my tests it is and also extends it with more functionality like the single any-char "?".

Sadly in mule we don't have a reusable implementation of the wilcard pattern matcher. There is a different one (none of them reusable) in the different places like the WilcardExpressionEvaluator, the MessagePropertyTransformer, WildcardFilter, etc.

At the moment this is just adding a new function with a matcher that is an apache backed, externally maintained, and more complete. It hopefully should replace the different custom and repeated implementations in the future. As new function, backwards compatibility, even being very important it's not crucial.