Tibco Brings Reusability To Web, Mobile Apps

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Tibco announced on Friday that it's bringing cutting-edge web and mobile data-integration and application-integration capabilities to its venerable ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks product with a 6.0 release of the platform.

Thousands of companies and more than 70,000 users have experience with BusinessWorks, and the 6.0 release gives them the latest capabilities to build and manage Web APIs, REST capabilities, and push notifications for mobile apps, according to Tibco. The release effectively introduces old-school developers to the latest new-school methods and capabilities, but Tibco argues that new-school developers also could benefit from the rigor, reusability, and integration power of its platform.

"A lot of companies have an approach to mobile that focuses on the device experience first, but then they realize they need some kind of back-end integration," said Thomas Been, Tibco's senior director of product marketing, in a phone interview with InformationWeek. "Sometimes they revert to point-to-point integration, but the challenge becomes exposing services and data to web and mobile apps in a systematic way."

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BusinessWorks gives developers an integration layer that lets them build and manage reusable integration components that can be used with legacy systems within the enterprise, as well as with a fast-growing array of data sources and services outside of the enterprise.

"Whether it's integration with partner data sources, services, or social networks, you don't want to mash up data within the mobile application itself because that will consume scarce resources on the device," says Been. "That's where you need an integration service on the back end on which you can mash up data in real time and easily define and maintain integration logic and services."

As an example of a next-generation mobile application blending integration requirements, Tibco said one of its pharmaceutical customers developed an iPad-based sales application that required both state-of-the-art mobile integration capabilities as well as tightly controlled access to data and content in legacy systems, ensuring that sales reps provide appropriate information to doctors without breaching guidelines on ethical selling practices.

The nuts and bolts of BusinessWorks 6.0 improvements include new Eclipse-based developer tooling for model-driven development, debugging, configuration, and deployment of integration functions and connectors without coding. The upgrade helps companies create and maintain integration services used in web and mobile environments much more quickly, according to Tibco.

These days, web-, mobile-, and big-data-oriented developers are turning to open-source integration vendors such as Talend. Tibco says it's responding by opening up the BusinessWorks community with a free BusinessWorks Express evaluation version and a BusinessWorks community site where developers can download integration resources and share integration components.

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