why is TIBCo called real time and event driven

Question

The TIBCO website says that it is a real time, event enabled infrastructure. Is there any layman's way of understanding why Websphere MQ which is also a messaging software is not real time? Because MQ is written in Java? Also what is the meaning of event driven infrstructure?

I understand (vaguely) that Java script is an event driven language in that the event is the user action (like a keypress,a click). So in the context of TIBCO, what does event driven mean? What is the event...an incoming request asking for a Service?

Answer 1

Well Term Event Driven, you want it in layman's language.Suppose you go to a mall for buying a product,after that you swipe your card, the moment you swipe a card (here one thing plays a role i.e. event) which is registered in the database, all your previous history gets invoked based on some mathematical computation TIBCO Soft. comes to know you have keen interest in buying some xyz brands product. So it will advertise its details on your mobile. This is what called event enabled enterprise. And i think it is beyond that!!

Answer 2

From a layman's perspective, event-driven can be considered like a telephone call. When the phone rings it interrupts you and (assuming you take the call) a real-time message protocol is established - i.e., you talk to the caller.

For you, the 'event' is the phone ringing, but critically, you do not have to wait for the call so you can do other tasks until this event occurs.

This type of architecture is generally described as publish/subscribe and is now very common in middleware layers such as TIBCO Business Works.

The alternative to an event-driven architecture is polling, where in this example you would regularly look at your phone to see if anyone is calling. Obviously, this is much more time consuming and distracting for you because you cannot focus on other tasks. There is also the risk that you might miss a call because it comes in when you are not looking. And obviously, this is a not a real-time method as the polling has an inherent delay unless you make the interval so small that you are doing nothing but polling.

Note though that WebSphere MQ supports both event-driven code and real-time message types.