TIBCO Integration (including BusinessWorks and Flogo)

Better flexibility with some BW component (ex MQ connection which accepts only one connection at startup)

Not easy to merge, as it is an XML file

MAR are very powerful but not easy to maintain

BW 5.x and the run-time agent both feel very dated, though this has been addressed with BW 6.x.

BW 5.x is not as friendly to CI, though this has been addressed with BW 6.x.

While the tool doesn't require specific programming language knowledge, it is still necessary to become familiar with BusinessWorks which is most effective with training. This does require that developers to have knowledge of the tool and has lead to some difficulties finding skilled software developers.

When discussing needed improvements to BW, we have to make a clear discrepancy between BW5 and BW6. BW5 is stable, tried-and-true, and easy to train people on. BW6 is the total opposite. Also, BW6 offers no significant advantage over BW5. I began using BW6 almost two years ago now. Our original intention was to make use of its REST activities first thing, then transition all our processes to BW6. Today I still only use it for REST, but I don't use the REST activities because they can't do complex queries. I have to use HTTP activities... We also have NO plans to move anything other than REST interfaces to BW6.

The main issue with BW6 is the dreadful bugs. It's a sophisticated system but very immature, so it's loaded with dangerous surprises. I even took the BW6 bootcamp class, intending to get a good start. But the class was mostly worthless because the instructor couldn't even run the example solutions. We just fumbled though numerous introductions to features. The best advice I can give is, first learn BW5. Then, if you really want to learn BW6, go ahead, but don't use it for any projects with critical deadlines. Also, push to the repo often, and understand that your workspaces are basically disposable. Things go wrong that just aren't worth all the XML editing to fix, so it's better to just backup an hour or two and start again. Also, delete and recreate if anything starts to act funny. When the designer crashes, start it up, shut it down, then start it up again. Also, you're not alone. Everyone knows this thing is buggy.

The BW6 designer is built on Eclipse. I was optimistic about this, and anticipated a more efficient interface compared to BW5's designer, which is clunky. BW6 designer looks more slick, but it offers no real advantages over BW5, and is heavy and unstable. It crashes often, is painfully slow, corrupts project files, and otherwise requires a lot more time than BW5 for even simple tasks.

Testing is more difficult on BW6 than on BW5. Setting up a whole integration and running it locally is an easy task with BW5. Things run quickly. It's easy to see the input and out put data from each process. Errors are quickly evident. BW6 -- just getting it to build and run can be difficult. The big issue is that there are numerous run time hazards that BW6 will not indicate after compilation. You just have to run the thing and sift through terminal output. Here's a tip. It always say every process is imparted. The gobs of red text that poor out, that's normal and OK. Neither of these sections are describing your error. Your error will be in black text somewhere.

Once you get your integration running, examining the input and output is challenging. The designer will take your focus for various reasons. For example, if you have http debugging enabled, you simply can't look at anything else. The focus is repeatedly returned to the standard output terminal. Or, even with minimal debugging and nothing trying to grab focus, just digging up the data can be difficult, especially if you're dealing with large objects. You can't click on an activity to see its output, as with BW5. You have to sift through the nested lists of processes and down into activities. It's actually hard to even explain how to see input/output without an image.... But you can't really even see the data from within the designer itself. You have to copy it out and paste it into a text editor.

There is no clear path to migration to newer versions ( 6.x from 5.x) of Tibco BW. Too much risk and cost is prohibitive. This makes it difficult to use the new features and capabilities of BW.

Licensing cost of add on components is prohibitive. There are no tangible benefits to business, but can make a huge difference to operations. Simply said IT wants it, but cost doesn't allow business to purchase these licenses.

Migration to BusinessWorks 6 from BusinessWorks 5 is a real challenge to date.

As Rest services take a lot of space nowadays BusinesWorks 5 should include a rest plugin by default. Customers are not willing to pay extra for that.

Another thing is SFTP. BusinessWorks must include SFTP activity as well in version 5.

JDBC Query, or update or SQL direct should have the place to use multiple JDBC connections dynamically. For example, if I have multiple databases that have the same table structure to query, I want to write a single JDBC query and loop through different databases. Currently I'm achieving that using Java code (extra coding effort, extra time consuming).