BW5 is still strong in Integration
August 18, 2017
BW5 is still strong in Integration
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO BusinessWorks
I would not comment about use in the whole organisation as we have more than 20 different teams using it, but I can talk only about our department. BW (full name is TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks) is a pretty light integration platform, which allows two different models: quick prototyping and building complex applications. The primary business problem, to my understanding, it is solving: allowing us to do a simple prototype quickly (hours for our business). So it is pretty good for Agile teams, who have to change things often and do not worry about tool itself.
- Integration with JMS (like Tibco EMS), where message has to be consumed from a bus.
- Data transformation and validation (XSD, XSLT).
- Easy integration with other frameworks like Java APIs, Soap services.
- Very simple code / project structure. It is all open XML, even packaged deployment files, so even visual check/compare is very simple. This allows us to use, for instance, an external editor or script to modify code or package.
- We are primary using BW5 line, so it has issues with custom IDE. It was, according to vendor, improved in BW6 product line, where Eclipse plugins are used. Personally I'm not in favor of this change, as it makes IDE much more slower and complex.
- TIBCO is a traditional vendor, so to get advantages of new standards or libraries, more recent version of BW has to be installed. Even then some Java plugins used by BWE are out-of-date. Most of the time it could be fixed by using Java interface and/or writing own plugins (JAR).
- Support for CD-CI is pretty complicated and easiest on Windows, although it was done within our organisation on Linux too.
- TIBCO objected to supporting our current version (BW5) in containers, even when there was no real technical reason (it works just fine), but licensing.
- In our environment 10 years ago it was a real win when BW was selected. Not without difficulties, but our department is alive mostly because of right choice of the tooling.
- With years passed, we found out that we are "locked to the vendor." For newcomers I would recommend designing their environment in such a way that BW is not a whole platform, but one of the major parts of a platform.
- With expected future migration to the newer version of BW6, we are facing a big number of challenges as environment is pretty different from BW5. Yet BW5 is not in plans to be discontinued as we were told, which is positive news to us.
I do not have enough (i.e. months) practical experience with other platforms except C/Java, but BW allows an experienced developer to deliver (to Test) a medium complexity program almost from scratch the same day. If I'm not mistaken, this is times faster compared to a Java development cycle.
BW IDE has both advantages (very easy) and disadvantages when talking about data mapping. It is definitely not perfect and hard to document, but it is not usual to map large (1 MB) XML messages for our group. We have not run into many situations when an external (Java) mapper is needed.
Current BW5 IDE has a Tester builtin, which is very easy/stable for small projects, but gets less stable/simple for a larger messages.