Tibco GI 3.2 Beta now Open Source

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, October 2, 2006 @ 7:00 am

Tibco has release 3.2 Beta of their General Interface (GI) product. Beyond adding support for Firefox, the big news is that GI is now Open Source under a BSD-style license. That's exciting news for those who want to use this powerful framework in products or intranets but have been put off by the licensing costs. Beyond turning Open Source, there are a few more noteworthy developments and observations:

• 3.2 Beta adds a Canvas widget that transparently does VML in IE and SVG in Firefox.
• 3.2 Beta sees the introduction of the Matrix widgets, a swiss army knife MVC components that displays a models as a grid, list or tree. Is editable, allows the embedding of other components, and supports various pagination models. Now you can scroll a grid and have it update dynamically from the back end.
• GI has a cross browser (IE and Firefox) Javascript debugger. Venkman is still better, but at least you have something that works well in IE.
• The Tibco GI developer community will now be wide open. Come one, come all. Check out the articles, example projects and tutorials.
• The release of GI as open source will allow developers to learn from it's dual-DOM approach.
• Tibco GI uses a code obfuscation technology to enforce public/private interfaces in Javascript. With the availability of source, developers can become more familiar with the internals of the framework. This should help when writing your own, custom widgets.
• As soon as the paint is dry on IE7, expect GI to support it.
• Tibco will offer other licensing terms for those that require support, indemnification, etc.

So why is Tibco releasing this polished product as Open Source? To drive demand for their other Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) products, such as their ESB. GI is quite explicitly and intentionally a client-side framework that works by consuming and orchestrating XML web services using protocols like SOAP and REST. It is quite elegant at doing so, but there are some tricky bits to developing applications using an SOA, such as sessions and transactions that span service calls. An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) helps with those and other challenges, and Tibco is definitely a leader in this product category.

This leads me to a caveat about the Tibco GI product and how the Open Source release is likely to tempt many people to use it in public facing sites: Tibco GI is intended for the corporate desktop. This explains its longtime exclusive support for just IE, and their new support for Firefox at that browser platform becomes more important to the corporate desktop (I'm told that the Tibco GI developers now use Firefox and the Venkman debugger extensively in their internal development work). There will likely never be support for browsers and browser versions that are irrelevant to the corporate desktop, though Tibco will continue evaluating Opera and Safari to see if support is warranted. If you plan on using Tibco for a public facing site, your options are much more limited than in a corporate environment where you control the server, client and network transport sides of the equation.

Still, this is exciting news, and those limitations shouldn't prevent you from using Tibco GI in your project as long as you understand what those limitations are.

 
  Technorati : ajax, ide, open source, tibco gi

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