TIBCO BusinessWorks review
August 09, 2017
TIBCO BusinessWorks review
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO BusinessWorks
TIBCO BW is being used by the whole organization. It's one of the several components that make up our accreditation software. It's primarily used in conjunction with TIBCO IProcess as a middleware component that communicate to Microsoft CRM and Microsoft SharePoint. Moreover, we also use it to create and deploy web services and Windows batch jobs.
- Intuitive UI Interface - uses drag and drop components and connects components together. This allows users with minimal programming skills to get up to speed quicker in learning BW.
- Configurable environment variables - the BW project EAR file can be deployed with different environment XML configurations that makes it flexible to use across different environments.
- Rapid development - faster and easier to develop because it uses pre-built components that just need to be strung together.
- I find the schema editor to be a bit clunky. So I usually end up always it in notepad and then saving on the project directory.
- Memory management could be improved on BW studio. I frequently have to re-open studio because it freezes .
- Maybe more seamless integration with Microsoft CRM and SharePoint products?
- BW has been a very reliable middleware that facilitates easy implementation of changes.
The development time is noticeably faster with TIBCO BW. The visual representation of the process flows provides developer with a quick sense of what a process is trying to do without delving in to the technicalities. It also helps that it comes with it's own debugger to test the processes to catch most errors before they get deployed on the server.
Data mapping is very useful because it reads the schema to determine and validate the input and output fields. It also provides a set of pre-built functions to manipulate values that get mapped into the fields. I am unaware of any other similar product that can do things similar to this.
TIBCO BW comes with a debugger that facilitates easy testing of processes within the editor. During debugging, the developer can step into Processes and associated sub-process/es and their components. And for each step, the developer can check the real-time value of input and output fields. Moreover, the debugger allows the developer to save test data onto a file and, conversely, load the same during testing.
The decision to use TIBCO was made even before the I joined the agency. I think the primary reason is because TIBCO has a superior workflow management system (TIBCO IProcess) and BW came-up as the best candidate to support it.