Thursday, September 13, 2007

A Different Perspective...

I've been working with Tibco for the last two months. Before that I was involved in a significant development effort building an automated build system for a large java development team. What a difference in projects.

Before this gig, I didn't have a lot of experience with big SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) solutions like Tibco. Approaching Tibco's 'solution' from a java perspective is a bit of a shock. Why? Isn't Tibco coded in Java? It certainly looks like it, however it's end users (I don't think) were supposed to be experience enterprise Java developers. It appears to be geared more towards business analysts and 'light' coders. ...Grab this component, drop it there, draw an arrow to it from that component.. etc. I was somewhat aware of that going into the project.

Probably the biggest surprise and 'Aha!' for me is Tibco's business model. What I see is Tibco markets their product to the big decision makers (read: people who sign the cheques). Generally, these people have a high level view of most things, including the development process and what actually happens behind the GUI of an application. Tibco very successfully markets their products to these people, telling them that Tibco applications will 'take your system from greedy (as in a money sink) to speedy'. It looks great on paper and running in a demonstration. It looks like a Godsend to businesses that are fed up with waiting a month for the release cycle to finish so they can get their little text change posted in production.

Who knows.. it might be. It seems to come down to who really owns the business. Who calls the shots about what the business direction is and what should be put into production? Who's responsible if revenue doesn't meet expected targets? Should the business be limited and reigned in by IT's processes because 'everything needs to be unit tested, smoke tested, functionally tested, regression tested, performance tested, and then tested in a staging environment'? Sometimes it's fun to wear a cowboy hat.

The Tibco tool we work with doesn't seem to have much in the way of a testing harness... at all. Please feel free to set me straight on this - I want to know how to do some QA against a Tibco app. Also, our Tibco application makes close to 2 dozen separate calls (between itself and over the wire with a significant amount of data) for 1 single request - it's VERY chatty. Apparently, Tibco's solution to increase performance and make chatty applications run faster... throw more hardware at it.

For me the jury is out. I don't have enough experience yet to make an informed decision either way: Java enterprise or Tibco SOA. You want granular control of how your application works at the lowest level and you don't need to turn production on a dime - I'd suggest Java. If you want quick turnaround and a business oriented IT application, and you're not concerned about what's happening underneath the covers, maybe Tibco is the option for you.

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