TIBCO BusinessWorks, a quick win!
July 19, 2017
TIBCO BusinessWorks, a quick win!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO BusinessWorks
TIBCO BusinessWorks is primarily used as a middleware integration tool within the entire organization. It provides solutions to complex requirements ranging from data transformation, integration between various systems and it's support for the use of multiple different protocols, such as JMS, HTTP, REST and so on. It also has the ability to be deployed in a fault tolerant and load balanced fashion thereby providing organizations with the ability to scale pretty easily. Within my organization it addressed various issues relating to integration with legacy systems and the rapid transformation of the data received from those systems into a standardized messaging standard. The major benefit of this tool was the rate as which solutions were developed and ready for market as against other technologies. Many "quick win" solutions were developed with Business Works.
- Seamless integration. Drag and drop approach with easy to use graphical user interface. These are strengths for the tool as the easier it is to complete a task means that the quicker the solution can be delivered, thus the time to market will be much quicker as well and can be quite beneficial in a competitive market.
- Rapid Transformation using the mapper activity. Many other technologies do not provide easy mapping tools such as BusinessWorks. It is quite simple to map from one xsd schema to another by means of matching incoming and outgoing message fields to one another and the rest of the work happens under the hood with very little effort from the developer. This is a big advantage as developers do not require intricate knowledge of the tool in order to complete the message transformation result/module.
- Effective debugging. BusinessWorks consists of the designer tool which developers would use to code against. This tool is also very effective from a debugging perspective. Local tests can be run locally via this designer tool and a particular transaction can be traced pretty easily in a very visual manner thereby making it easier to test code before deploying and also to debug issues in order to correct defects. This is very beneficial regarding defect turnaround times.
- There is currently no out of the box test case package included in the tool. There are some alternatives which can be bought from 3rd party vendors, however those too are not very effective. As an integration tool, unit test cases should be part of the package or should atleast be available from the vendor itself.
- There is no easy integration into maven and it's supporting standards, thus making automation a little tricky. It requires organizations to develop in house maven plugins which is not ideal in this day and age. Products need to support maven or similar tools by default or atleast make it easy to configure if required.
- The BusinessWorks 5 java compiler/debugger is not up to standards as it does not include a java debugger and it can become quite annoying to use another java debugger to correct your code and then only implement it within BusinessWorks. Would be great to have a decent java debug tool within the designer as well.
- The organization used BusinessWorks in a solution which on boarded new clients on an online portal within a matter of 20 minutes. This feature allowed users to register in the comfort of their own home, thereby increasing sales and decreasing costs due to the fact of saving on resources who had previously captured clients manually. The ROI was realized quite quickly.
- Faster 'Time to Market' due to the fact of the ease of use of the BusinessWorks tool, thereby realizing ROI faster than expected.
- Easier debugging capabilities positively impacted QA, thus no downtime experienced due to potential defects. This provided the organization with a more positive reputation as well within the market.
When it comes to Time to Market and visual creation, TIBCO BusinessWorks is one of the fastest and most efficient tools which I have ever used. The visual creation has been extremely simplified whereby activities are grouped together based on their purpose and each of these activities can be dragged, dropped and linked together in a "sequence like" flow which makes understanding the flow really easy to grasp. This simplified approach provides user with the advantage of completing tasks much quicker and it will provide that particular organization with a definite competitive advantage within the market.
TIBCO BusinessWorks mapping capabilities is quite effective as the tool provides the user with an entire view of the process at hand, namely, the output result of a previous activity as well as the expected input of the current activity. Let's assume both of these activities are different systems which the user is integrating into. Since the user can visually see both the output as well as the input required, it makes it pretty simple to map from the result output fields into the specified input fields by means of creating a transition from one to another. All types of mapping is handled in the same manner and it supports xpath 1.0 as well as xpath 2.0. I have found BusinessWorks to be quite effective with regards to it's mapping capabilities as other systems which I have worked on does not provide this level of simplicity and ease of use.
Within BusinessWorks, a piece of code is developed within a process definition. A project usually contains multiple process definitions, each containing specific pieces of an implementation. For purposes of re-use, any of these process definitions maybe called within another process definition as well if that particular "method" is required within another operation. This feature also makes it really easy to test one's processes by means of creating a test process and calling the actual process definitions from within the test process. By following this approach, one can achieve almost 100% code coverage from an integration testing perspective. Other tools also provide integration testing but requires more configuration in order to execute particular test cases. TIBCO BusinessWorks supports the Test driven development approach out of the box.
I have used JCAPS as an integration tool. This was purely from a transformation and data mapping perspective. I prefer using TIBCO BusinessWorks because it is much simpler when it comes to mapping fields from one system to another. JCAPS require a lot of configuration in order to complete simple mappings and the graphical user interface is not very easy to understand. There is too many transitions all of the place and a new user will not be able to update particular implementations as easy as it can be achieved in BusinessWorks. Based on investigations and demo's on Oracle Fusion, the ease of use is not as simple as BusinessWorks either which is a massive disadvantage in today's competitive environment.