Publishing applications or websites is easy with Microsoft IIS. You don't need external software or complicated tutorials involving command lines and editing configuration files. On other hand, sometimes the troubleshooter needs a high knowledge of Windows Server, Registry, and tools to debug the application. If you need to host non-Microsoft technology as PHP pages or have a low budget, I recommend IIS equivalent software as Apache.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces is useful for storing in memory data which enables fetching data quickly and efficiently. We can make use of TIBCO ActiveSpaces APIs for storing and retrieving data. In our organization, we store user session details in TIBCO ActiveSpaces and this session detail is used for authentication and authorizing user. We have integration TIBCO ActiveSpaces with React UI and TIBCO Business Works.
A big advantage that we use all the time is reviewing the logs that automatically get generated in IIS. It has helped us troubleshoot various problems in our applications over the years.
IIS integrates really well with Visual Studio and TFS. We are able to quickly deploy new applications and changes to applications when requested by the business.
IIS has proven that it is easy to configure and maintain with minimal effort.
Like all other IMDG solutions, Tibco ActiveSpaces provides a scalable and distributed cache solution, which is supposed to have high throughput and high availability.
As it is under the Tibco umbrella, it is seamlessly integrated with other Tibco products.
It breaks the traditional "local cache" boundary and limitation, instead unifies many "local physical memory" to create one huge "In-Memory Data Grid", and serves the data provider/consumer application logically as one "Memory Cloud."
A lot of non-frequently updated data can be cached in this IMDG, to allow fast access, which saves the I/O latency caused by many traditional file system-backed storage solutions.
ActiveSpaces 3.2 is not compatible with the latest version of TIBCO Business Event 5.x. And ActiveSpaces 2.x is not compatible with ActiveSpaces 3.x hence there is a big difference in the BusinessEvents supported version of AS and the latest.
ActiveSpaces takes more disc space and TIBCO does not offer data compression logic out of the box. Developers need to do extra coding to use java snippets to compress and decompress the payload. Although the data compression gives must better performance and speed to the system.
The compression and decompression API are not offered by TIBCO out of the box, which is a shame. These are so easy and simple to implement, still TIBCOdoes not provide them as an option out of the box.
We have no intention to replace all applications running on top of the IIS platform. Not all applications support other platforms and not all support staff are skilled in Linux/Apache platform support. Whereas IIS may not be the best performing or most secure web platform available, for the aforementioned reasons, it is impossible not to continue use of this product.
As I've mentioned earlier, Microsoft IIS is very simple and easy to use. The user interface is a little bit overloaded with a huge number of different options, but once you have a little clue of what you are doing and what you need - no issues at all.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces is easy to install and integrate with other product suites. It is easy to understand and implement as well. TIBCO ActiveSpaces supports multiple databases for storing the data(we are using Oracle Database). All the master data related to the users is being stored using TIBCO ActiveSpaces which keeps the data in memory and help to retrieve it quickly. It has helped to prevent concurrent login sessions by the same user as session details are stored in TIBCO ActiveSpaces and we override the existing user session with the new session details.
ARR (application request routing) in Microsoft IIS Server enables the web-admins to increase the web app reliability and availability through the rule based routing and load balancing of HTTP requests which in turn provides highly available server. IIS 7.0 Manager also provides kernel as well as user mode caching for faster performance and in case if the server fails, the IIS server has good amount of details logged in its log files which help understand and debug the cause quickly. Load balancing facilitates IIS server to fight against availability issues.
In my experience, I have never had significant issues with IIS performance. Sometimes I've experienced issues with loading time, but it is mostly related to the web site code. However Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing free cloud services with very limited resources, and in that scenario, "heavy" websites on IIS could be the issue. In other situations - performance is good.
As mentioned earlier there is so much documentation or guides or stack overflow questions out there that someone will have faced the same or very similar scenario to what you are going through that you will almost certainly find a solution to what you are after.
Apache is java. Java is unnecessary complex. No developer wants to invest in learning all the hundreds of text based configuration files to get something done. Also, apache gives you the most evil and un-usable user interface possible. [Microsoft] IIS makes [life] after development easy, which is already complex enough to be bothered by something as mundane as exposing your work over the internet.
Actually, we are gradually replacing the Tibco ActiveSpaces with Redis (for caching purpose only) or Hazelcast (for embedded mode and also for in-memory distributed computation purpose + in-memory distributed IPC purpose).
Microsoft IIS Server is scalable if the underlying server configuration is done correctly. Use x64 edition v/s 32bit and using 32bit mode application pools are some of the tweaks to be done to make the IIS server scalable. There are too many small configurations need to be carried out in order to make a highly scalable IIS server hence not giving full score in this area.
Developers with basic knowledge of TIBCO and general data knowledge can easily design and develop an ActiveSpaces based cached solution. As the ActiveSpaces concepts are very simple and easy to understand.
Some business areas can predict the high influx of a service usage during a certain period. Business will be highly rewarded if they can identify these business areas and provide a cached solution using TIBCO AS.
Again, this is not a TIBCO ActiveSpaces only advantage and this is true for any/all caching products.
Some examples for the previous points are
a. telecom company pre-loading (eager load) customer's usage for the last month, right before releasing/issuing the bills to the customers.
b. Airline industry loading the customer's itinerary a week before his travel start date. Hence the last minute scrambling to fetch the customer's itinerary travel plans can be avoided.
