Has anyone used TIBCO GI?

Question

I was checking out the TIBCO GI the other day and I was impressed.

• Has anyone used it extensively?
• What are your thoughts?
• What drawbacks did you encounter?
• Is it suitable for Internet or only Intranet apps?

I appreciate any input you can shed on this.

Answer 1

Yes, I have used it pretty extensively, here are some of my thoughts. Will add to them as the occur.

• I don't rate the approach of implementing the IDE in the framework itself (it runs in a browser window). There are many, many quirks and it can lead to a very frustrating experience. I normally develop all of the JS, XML etc in Intellij Idea using the Javascript debug window to run the IDE itself. After working on a file, it has to be reloaded in the IDE, but its still much more efficient.

• Using the IDE, an entire application can be layed out relatively quickly.

• There is a pretty steep learning curve. The API is extensive and the community forums aren't great when you do run into problems.

• Much of the GUI painting is done using inline style attributes, making them difficult to skin and get the overall application looking exactly how you might want. If is for this reason that I think GI is more suited to intranet apps than publicly available ones.

• GI uses a 'dual DOM' approach, holding it's own internal representation of each on-screen element. This can make it difficult to fully integrate other frameworks such as JQuery etc.

• As RIAD environments go, I think it is awesome. I find that doing things the GI way is an order of two faster than going down the request/response route.

• I really like the enforced separation of presentation and business logic.

• The JS extensions they put in, like introspective package, interface and class definitions are quite clever and very useful.

Answer 2

I completely agree with mysomic, but:

• Unfortunately Tibco GI has a huge disadvantage of it's weight and how slow it runs.

• jQuery is much much faster.

• Also I run into issues of different behavior of developed UI under IE and firefox.

• Lack of documentation.

Answer 3

I agree with u on some point: Compare JQuery with GI, I think they are not the same level:

• Jquery which implement the CSS searchengine , provide the plugin structure and some util tools, but it is still like component.
• GI , which is the enterprise RIA solution, provide the mapping utility , class interface,extends, implement structure, AMP plugin structure, I10N, I18N etc. it is like the composite level. and also it has the GI IDE, that is every cool.