TIBCO BusinessWorks Review
August 11, 2017
TIBCO BusinessWorks Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO BusinessWorks
Business Works is used primarily for the following -
1) Orchestration of EAI processes - standards-based integration of existing applications to implement shared business services
2) Automation - the daily/weekly/monthly data refresh jobs handled by the operations teams
3) Hosting of SOAP/REST services - implement the backend or the business logic for end user applications
1) Orchestration of EAI processes - standards-based integration of existing applications to implement shared business services
2) Automation - the daily/weekly/monthly data refresh jobs handled by the operations teams
3) Hosting of SOAP/REST services - implement the backend or the business logic for end user applications
- The UI based modelling capability allows for near zero coding in order to implement business logic. Building a SOAP/REST service in java may require more than a couple of hours to build and deploy. Same thing in BW will take half hour.
- BW has adaptors/connectors to most third party application/tools which allows for standards based integration
- Even though BW is a java based software product, it scales well and is easy to debug and manage at runtime. Since it runs in a JVM allowing standard profiling tools to be used.
- TIBCO introduced BW 6.x series which is based on a completely different architecture (OSGi based) compared to BW 5.x series which is much simpler.
- The concept of deploying/managing multiple applications across JVMs to allow for complex deployment architecture using OSGI didn't see much adoption in TIBCO Service Grid product.
- Even though the modelling constructs in TIBCO designer (BW 5.x) have been made available available/improved in BW 6.x (eclipse based) , the simplicity of development, testing & debugging BW 5.x to solve complex problems was the main reason for its popularity/adoption.
- Support for cloud container (such as docker) for BW has been late and this is made available only in BW 6.x
- Support for CI in BW 5.x
- TIBCO Businessworks is an expensive software. However set-up of this software with in a shared platform has driven adoption with-in the enterprise given the ease of development. This has had a positive impact on the turn around time for service development
TIBCO Designer (BW 5.x) is extremely lightweight and allows for quick development of integration flows. Even though it is not eclipse based the menu is pretty intuitive and responsive to configure shared resources, work with schemas and map integration flows. Testing/debugging feature is excellent as well.
The mapping capabilities (XPath) in BW are extremely easy to use and very powerful for lightweight payloads. For large XML payloads XPath may not be well suited and other options need to considered
The integrated tester in the BW Designer IDE is very easy and intuitive to use. The ability to save input data for test cases makes it possible to re-use the data between testing cycles. All this is possible only in the IDE and cannot be automated, something which is provided in BW6.
Oracle SOA, IBM Websphere Modeler