The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Opinions on Tibco?

Hi,

I've been assigned to a new project which consists in integrating several legacy applicactions using a middleware messaging system called Tibco.

I have previous experience using MQ Series with JMS but I don't know anything about Tibco. After googleing a bit I've readed some horrible things about it, namely that is very complex and lacks flexibility, so, has anyone of you ever used that thing? Is it any good?

Any informed opinion based on hands-on experience will be greatly appreciated :)

WhatIsTheTibco
Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Opinions of Tibco.... I've got a few opinions on Tibco....
I was forced to use the product about three years ago, to connect two applications. Tibco was not needed but some big shot wanted to say that we were using Tibco. Three years later they are now asking me to remove it for political reasons as well.

Ok working with it. I used the C++ Adapter SDK to create a custom adapter. The first problem I had with it is that they have this proprietary messaging format which isn't that extensible. So I had to translate one proprietary message format (my vendor's) to another (Tibco). I would have much preferred to use XML (I tried to just pass an XML message over Tibco, but my boss didn't like that). So basically, I had to build two custom adapters, one to encode the message and one to decode the message. Worthless.

Their tools are rather worthless as well. All of their Admin tools are this java based GUI which is slow and not easy to use at all. None of the normal windows shortcuts work (Cut, Copy, Paste, etc.) And it is not intuitive at all.

There are just way too many parts as well. There is the Roundevouz agent, Repository, the custom adapter, etc. All of these pieces just add another point of failure. We stilll are having production issues to this day that we cannot recreate.

And Tibco support is horrible. I have worked with them a couple of times and all they do is read from the SDK manual which I had already done. I ended up having to toss my problem and create a huge work around.

Now I hear Tibco has some good products like their web portal, but I just didn't like using their messaging system.

Matt Watson
Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Be careful about applying MQ messaging concepts directly to Tibco. MQ and Tibco Rendezvous are both messaging systems, but they have different strengths. While they've both added features over time to somewhat converge in functionality, I think of them as solving different problems.

MQ’s strongpoint is moving transaction reliably between systems.

Rendezvous strongpoint is in trading environments, update 500 trader screens with the latest stock price (and traders will notice if the screens updates are not simultaneous). It uses broadcasts to achieve the performance for one-to-many updates with some limits on guaranteed delivery.

I’d be careful to pick the right messaging system for your requirement. Currently, I’m consulting at a client that uses both, Tibco for communication between the trading applications and MQ to send transactions to their mainframe apps. Both products are solid & the client is happy with them.

If you are just starting with Tibco & your company has the budget, attending the classes would be a big boost on using it correctly in your application. (e.g.. because it uses broadcasts, the number of subnets in your environment is significant).

jq
Wednesday, December 3, 2003

use spread.... much better... more reliable, higher performance, and much higher message delivery guarantees. (safe messaging allows for virtually synchronous state machines running on different physical computer). And you can't beat the price, free. www.spread.org

no name
Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Our company spent a boatload of money on it, then sent some of us to training for two weeks.

The training duo couldn't get the lab (that _they_ wrote) to work on half the people's machines (that _they_ imaged).

Too many moving parts. With the emergence of web services, not really relevent. Thankful, I haven't had to implement a solution with it.

Run away, run far away.

Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Hani had a great rant on using TIBCO APIs a couple months ago: http://jroller.com/page/fate/20030924

Chris Winters
Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Mmm... not a very nice picture, I think I'll start sniffing glue again.

Is anyone hiring?

Thank you for your comments.

WhatIsTheTibco
Wednesday, December 3, 2003

It sucks!

It sucks!

I've always thought of paint-a-picture coding utilities as Lego for salesmen and managers. You can't actually build a house with them, but they look good in the sales pitch. Tibco's Integration Manager takes this to ridiculous extremes ... it is nowhere near as competent as Lego, worse than Duplo, even ... and there isn't an alternative!

Their editors are clumsy hacks. Can't resize an editor window without dragging its frame? *lol* ... Can't search your code base for instances of a given variable? *more lol*

Argh, I don't even want to THINK more about this product. Definitely near the top of my Ten-Worst-Of-All-Time.

Stick with MQ. Works, works well.

HeWhoMustBeConfused
Wednesday, December 3, 2003

If you can get Tibco experience on your CV then go for it. It seems to be a key skill to many jobs in financial software dev. And let's face it, that is where the money is.

Thursday, December 4, 2003