Rich Internet Application with TIBCO General Interface By Nitin Goswami

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1 Rich Internet Application with TIBCO General Interface By Nitin Goswami Introduction: This whitepaper provides a comparison based overview of TIBCO General Interface s business and technical strength and future usability. RIA applications are powerful, rich, highly productive and great in performance like desktop software. The unique architecture of this product makes it possible to cater the industry need of rich Internet applications. What is Rich Internet Application and Web 2.0? Industries have realized the need of enterprise-grade application deployment to a standard web browser however the limitations of the current browser is preventing them to meet this goal. Need for RIA is highly required to improve the customer experience by providing more user friendly, Rich, Highly interactive as well as fast web application that results in a satisfied customer and higher profitability. The contemporary internet application is being replaced by RIA technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML) and other cutting edge technologies and web 2.0 features. The standard web browser has evolved significantly into a full fledged platform for developing enterprise-grade application. However it still remains a HTML page rendered due to its Document Centric Paradigm. Web Application Development Vs Desktop/Thick-Client Application Development: Since long, industries are facing the challenges in deciding whether to choose Web based solution or to choose desktop application solutions. Each of them has its pros n cons. Web Application: Pros. - Low cost of development, deployment and maintenance - Easy deployment. - XML, DHTML, XHTML, CSS support. - Instant distribution. - Remote Access. Cons. - Less interactive - Inferior performance - Document paradigm prevents objectorientated enterprise grade application development. - Declarative mark-up language 6/5/2007 Page 1 of 6

2 Desktop-based/Thick-Client Application: Pros. - Better performance. - More interactive. - Service Differentiating GUI. - More Productive. Cons. - Higher cost of development, deployment and maintenance. - More development time. - Difficult distribution and deployment. - Resource consuming. Industries are paying high price to achieve benefits of think-client based enterprise applications with ample features. Finally TIBCO comes up with a solution in the form of its product TIBCO General Interface which spun off the benefits of Think-Client at a lower cost of development, deployment and maintenance. TIBCO General Interface Why TIBCO General Interface? Taking a practical example where a music store wants to go online to enable e-commerce. Here are the customer requirements: Cost effective Light weight Rich and fast Extensible Secure Minimum Resources requirement General Protocols Support How TIBCO General Interface caters the client requirements? Low Cost Solution: - Less development time: o Rich foundation libraries help developers to build application more quickly. o Front-end and Server-side components are independent and can be developed simultaneously. o Change requirement at front-end do not affect server side code, and viceversa. o Deployment of TIBCO General Interface application significantly reduces solution authoring time. o Visual tools and over 100 ready to use components make the development so fast o As development has been made too easy with the provided rich set of libraries, componentization has made life easier for developers. 6/5/2007 Page 2 of 6

3 - Low maintenance cost: o Loosely coupled front-end and server-side components make the application more maintainable as well as extensible. o Maintenance cost can be reduced 30 to 50% - Low Hardware Cost: o Off-loading presentation processes to workstation saves up to 50% server resources. o 95% of the bandwidth can be available for data which was earlier being used by HTML. o Existing workstation CPUs of 350 MHz and 128 megabytes of RAM are more than sufficient to get great performance out of TIBCO General Interface. Light Weight/ Rich/ Fast/ Extensible: o Basic web browser is the only requirement to run TIBCO General Interface application in turn enables the instant delivery of browser-based applications that have the look, feel and performance of desktop installed software. o TIBCO General Interface has significantly reduced the performance bottle-necks such as page reload mechanism. Now the application is not just a series of interlinked hyperlinks, the main screen can be segregated into various sub screens and each sub-screen can be loaded/off-loaded independently based on their own rules/requirements. Secure: As TIBCO General Interface application runs on a standard web browser, adheres SSL and other security standards provided by the browser. Minimum Resources requirement: The architecture of TIBCO General Interface significantly reduces the over all network traffic as only Data travels across Client-Server. Usually 95% of the bandwidth used to carry mark-up information and 5% for the data. Shifting the View part of MVC architecture completely to the client side frees the 100% band-width for data. General Protocols Support: General Interface supports multiple protocols for communicating with services in the network. The basic supported interactions, which all function over HTTP/S, include XML/SOA/HTTP/HTTPS What makes it possible? TIBCO General Interface consists of two components: TIBCO General Interface Framework: The distributable runtime framework for running browser-based General Interface applications. The framework is located in the JSX directory. TIBCO General Interface Builder: A browser-based, visual development environment for developing General Interface applications that use the General Interface Framework. General Interface Builder is itself a General Interface application. General Interface Builder is located in the GI_Builder directory. 6/5/2007 Page 3 of 6

4 Run Time: Server-Based MVC Vs TIBCO General Interface MVC: 6/5/2007 Page 4 of 6

5 Communication with Data Server: Figure 3: Processing external data Figure 4: Processing internal data FUTURE AND POWER OF TIBCO General Interface: TIBCO General Interface can be clubbed with the following technologies in order to provide high end applications having Rich GUI. - TIBCO GI + AJAX - AJAX CRUD with Struts2 and TIBCO GI - TIBCO GI + Spring - TUBCO GI+ OpenAJAX+ DWR etc. 6/5/2007 Page 5 of 6

6 Conclusion: TIBCO General Interface is an initiative to overcome the traditional Document-Centric web application development paradigm. It provides a powerful Object-Oriented enterprise-grade application development environment. This product has a potential to grab a large market share as it provides a powerful, rich, highly-interactive and a user-friendly GUI yet an economical option. The power of architecture lies in its off-loaded view at the client-side which in turn results in greater bandwidth utilization, low hardware resource requirement and amazing performance. 6/5/2007 Page 6 of 6