I’ve spent a week’s time being trained as a TIBCO developer. This was a fairly intensive class covering many topics in all day cram sessions. Bring the pain.
TIBCO’s slogan (The Power of Now) speaks to its ‘real time’ process driven abilities. Truth be told it is near real time as TIBCO uses polling in some cases to identify changes and take action as a result. But, I split hairs here. Slogans are the language of marketing lingo, not a white paper spec sheet.
Just What Is TIBCO?
To begin with, TIBCO is a company not a piece of software. This company develops and sells a suite of products that is often collectively referred to as ‘TIBCO’. It might be easier to discuss what the TIBCO software suite is not then to define what it is. The suite is just about as all encompassing a Borg-like piece of middleware on the planet that I’ve ever experienced.
Wikipedia, the web’s premier source of accurate information …. puts it thusly:
According to the company website, TIBCO develops solutions for the following: Application Integration, B2B Integration, Business Activity Monitoring, Business Intelligence, Business Process Management, Complex Event Processing, Data Integration, Enterprise Service Bus, Mainframe Integration, Master Data Management, Messaging, Rich Internet Application, SOA, System Monitoring and Management.
Can I get some kitchen sink to go with that? It’s not altogether intuitive. After the 2nd day of training, a well-regarded Senior Developer on my team turned to me and said, “I’m still trying to figure out just what this thing is and how all the pieces work together.”
This isn’t to say that the software doesn’t work. Quite to the contrary. The software has been around and evolving since 1985 with the TIBCO moniker being attached in 1996. Customers include such household names as Delta Airlines, Cingular, Intuit, Reuters, Seagate, and on and on. TIBCO is currently hosting 14 video testimonials. That’s marketing muscle that can’t be bought and speaks to the product’s usefulness.
Training. Once More Into the Breach!
My training centered around the Enterprise Service Bus, SOA, Data Integration, and Business Process Management. But these are just terms; buzzwords thrown about all over the web. The actual products that encompass these gaudy terms are TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks, TIBCO Adapters, TIBCO Monitoring Services, and TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus.
The latter of these products is the foundation of TIBCO’s software suite. The Enterprise Messaging Service Bus is the TIBCO implementation of the Java Messaging Service. There is support for other (primarily legacy) protocols but JMS is defacto. The bus allows for messages to be sent between disparate systems and actions taken upon those messages. Adapters provide a means for systems (like databases, LDAPs, application servers, etc) to talk to the bus where the messages, JDBC for example, are converted to TIBCO XML messages so the bus logic can process them.
Where’d That Logic Come From?
Enter BusinessWorks Designer; a Java desktop application built upon the Eclipse Framework. BusinessWorks is the place where the logic is defined in a graphical interface to the extent of how events are detected and what actions will take place based upon those events. The sky is truly the limit in regard to what can be done. For example, detecting a table insert in a database table which causes a logfile to be written, an email sent and SSL enabled web service called with XYZ parameters. Or, an email is received triggering an FTP transfer, followed by a mainframe COBOL app being called all inside a transaction.
I’m really not doing the products justice with this cursory description. I’m scratching the surface of all the functionality BusinessWorks provides.
The Rise of SOA Over 3-Tier
Just what is the Service Oriented Architecture that all those marketers are touting? The idea is to avoid the classic 3-tier architecture (client, app server, database) and instead allow the Messaging Service Bus act as the intermediary between platforms. In that way, the bus can take advantage of transaction support, change in execution path based on events or BusinessWorks programming logic, and making rapid change to architecture without having to update each service individually but by changing settings on the bus. This decoupling will better enable architects to provide services to services area such as Finance, HR, Accounting, and Helpdesk. The bus is Master Control.
Alternatives
There are alternatives available to TIBCO’s suite of products. Commercially IBM, SAP and Oracle provide their own competing products. I expect they cost quite a bit themselves. On the Open Source front, have a look at Mule, RabbitMQ, and Sun’s OpenMQ, among others.
Master Control Says, “End Of Line”
The Enterprise Messaging Service Bus is telling me I have to wrap it up now. I’ll post more on TIBCO as I put it into use in our development group. Just don’t expect deadly discs..