WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces is only suited in the company where Tibco suites have been already used, the license cost is not a concern, it is only required for data caching purposes and only works in the client/server mode for middle-sizes of data. If the expectation is data cache + distributed computation or embedded IMDG is also one requirement or the data cluster needs span multiple data centers, other light-weight OpenSource IMDG solutions should be considered
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
Tibco ActiveSpaces is an excellent caching tool. With good design, we can haven a efficient cache layer, that can respond to business needs in sub-seconds (milliseconds) rather than seconds / minutes to respond. This is specially useful for improving the efficiency of the services used in customer interactions.. like login, serving billing information, serving the customer's service usage and any other information customer is interested in accessing frequently.
System process can also use the ActiveSpaces . By caching the information frequently used by the system processes, the data cab be accessed more frequently. And without much disruptions.
If you are already using TIBCO tools, then ActiveSpaces is the right choice to use, as the product is well integrated with all the TIBCO Suite of products. ActiveSpaces integrates well with most common products like TIBCO BusinessWorks, TIBCO BusinessEvents etc.
ActiveSpaces can be easily deployed to a target (TIBCO) environment, with very little additional effort. Although there is an effort required to deploy them.
ActiveSpaces is supported by TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.13 and TIBCO BusinessWorks 6.x. Hence you are not forced to use any version of TIBCO BW, just because you have to use TIBCO ActiveSpaces.
The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces Tuple-based data structure is not flexible enough to support customized native data objects.
There is no secondary index option.
Doesn't provide "predicate based In-Grid distributed search and result aggregation."
only can be used as data cache, the node's only contribute memory but can not use the data partition owner node's computation power to apply the distributed computation customized by the user.
Cross data center replication (geographically) is a pain.
Encounter the performance issue when the data volume is huge, even according to the architecture design, linear scaling up should not have that issue.
One biggest advantage of the Tibco ActiveSpaces is it's ease of integration with the TIBCO suite of products. Hence it is more suitable to TIBCO AS in conjunction with the TIBCO suite of products. All products could offer the same or different level of advantages. For the enterprises that are already using the AWS, then they will prefer to go for Amazon ElastiCache. Oracle In-Memory Cache might have the same level of advantage but the if you are already using the TIBCO suite of products like the BusinessWorks, then TIBCO ActiveSpaces seems to be the right option since there is an out of box plugin available for TIBCO AS and it is compatible with TIBCO products. Otherwise, lots of custom coding is required to use the Oracle or Amazon products as these plugins are not readily available and supported by TIBCO BW.
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
