The Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (formerly Docker Enterprise, acquired by Mirantis in November 2019)aims to let users ship code faster. Mirantis Kubernetes Engine gives users one set of APIs and tools to deploy, manage, and observe secure-by-default, certified, batteries-included Kubernetes clusters…

Return to navigation

Product Details

About
Tech Details

What is TIBCO ActiveSpaces?

ActiveSpaces from TIBCO supports an application infrastructure.

TIBCO ActiveSpaces Technical Details

Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No

Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives

Compare with

Reviews and Ratings

(12)

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)

Sort by

Popular Filters

Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why

March 11, 2021

IMDG Spaces: Active or Not

Verified User

Strategist in Information Technology

Package/Freight Delivery Company, 10,001+ employees

Score 4 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tibco ActiveSpaces was introduced in our company years back, the original purpose was to add the IMDG caching layer on corporate foundation services to boost the response performance. It is still used together with other Tibco products like EMS, business work, and business events.

Pros and Cons

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.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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

Return on Investment

The cost of Tibco ActiveSpaces is quite high, while the added value it brought is not as we expected.

Alternatives Considered

Redis

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).

Other Software Used

Redis, Apache Kafka, Docker

March 13, 2018

TIBCO's Cache

Mani Venugopal

Senior Technical Consultant

TalkTalk (Telecommunications, 501-1000 employees)

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I work for a telecom company, TIBCO is the only integration tool used within my organization. TIBCO ActiveSpaces was is used in multiple scenarios. One of the first implementations was aimed at speeding up the customer's login and building the customer's dashboard.

TIBCO ActiveSpaces (AS) is used for caching the customer information that is used to build the Customer's dashboard. The following services are cached using TIBCO ActiveSpaces for this purpose:

1. To cache the customer's in-flight orders.
2. To cache all customer's recent interactions (both customer initiated and organization initiated interactions)
3. To cache customer's current product portfolio.
4. To cache customer's account information including last bill amount and payment history.
5. Details about customer's last bill.

This information is mastered in 3 different applications - CRM system for the customer product portfolio, billing system for customer's last bill and account information, inflight orders from an in-house order management system etc.

By using ActiveSpaces customer's login which was sometimes taking up to 7.5 seconds was reduced to 700 milliseconds. Thus improving the customer experience and also saving the individual application resources and their system processes.

Pros and Cons

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.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

1. ActiveSpaces is well suited if, we can generate an event to notify the data has changed in the source. So we can easily use these events to update the cache.

2. Data in ActiveSpaces can either be pre-loaded (eager loading) or loaded when this data is requested (lazy loading). Pre-loading requires considerable time and resources to fetch the data from a source. This may not be a good option unless we can easily bulk load from a source rather than invoking the target application API to load the data one-by-one.

3. Identified the trigger points from the target applications, that could invalidate the data held in ActiveSpaces. So based on the triggers the AS data can be easily be updated.

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon ElastiCache, Couchbase and Oracle In-Memory Database

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.

Other Software Used

TIBCO BusinessEvents, TIBCO Mashery

Return to navigation

TIBCO ActiveSpaces

Entry-level set up fee?

Offerings

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

Alternatives Pricing

TIBCO Cloud Integration

Mirantis Kubernetes Engine

SAP Business Technology Platform

Oracle WebLogic

Dynatrace

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF ( Web Application Firewall)

HCL Digital Experience

IBM DataPower Gateway

AWS Auto Scaling

IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition

Oracle Integration (OIC)