Tibco GI 3.4 - New Home Page and SVN Repository

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, May 7, 2007 @ 3:00 am

I just checked out Tibco GI from the new SVN repository (see the new GI home page). It comes to 51MB with 242 Javascript files with roughly 84000 lines of Javascript code and comments. That makes it the most substantial client-side Ajax framework by a long shot. Of course sheer numbers are not a measure of quality, but they are an indication of the significant effort that must have gone into it's development.

Another cool thing, that I wasn't aware of, is that GI will work just fine in Firefox on Linux. Here I've been using it all this time in IE on XP (no Vista for me just yet -- I may be moving to a Mac) while I could have been jamming in Linux.

GI isn't actually supported, but in my limited tests it seems to work just fine.

Otherwise, GI 3.4 (Yuba) looks to be more of a bug fix release -- no major features or improvements.

Update: In response to Kevin's informative post below, I didn't mean to imply that GI was bloated in any way, just that it represented a significant investment in dollars and man hours.

 
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1. 

   To be clear, those 84,000 lines include:

   GI Framework: the ajax runtime with over 100+ ready made ajax components … alothether at runtime about 400K of javascript (not 51MB) … and that only if you load up all 100+ components. GI 3.4 alos includes a project optimiztion tool that will only load the minimum set of libraries you need for your app.

   GI Source Build Tools: GI Frameowrk’s source is much larger than it’s runtime. This is because the source has code forks in it to handle browser differences. But when you process the source through the source build tools (a shell script) you not only compress the code, but also generate multiple different runtime files — one for each browser supported. That way there’s no unused code to send to the browser (e.g. if you had forked code at runtime only a fraction every gets called).

   GI Builder: these are the visual tools that provide WSYIWYG layouts and GUI assembly, plus wizard based connectivity to XML or SOAP services. Of course you can tap into the JavaScript communication API to access JSON or any other HTTP service accessible from the browser.

   GI Test Automation Kit: Unit, functional and regression testing tools extending the Selenium Core, including JSUnit test cases.

   So don’t freak out at the 84,000 lines or 51MB. There’s a huge set of features in GI and you only need to use the fraction of those that are relevant to your project. GI is the result of over 6-years in market experience for creating Ajax application that look and feel like desktop GUIs.

   Comment by Kevin Hakman, Monday, May 7, 2007 @ 9:00 am

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