I spent this morning at a seminar co-hosted by TIBCO and Intelligent Enterprise, featuring Michael Melenovsky from Gartner. One of my reasons for attending was to find out more about TIBCO’s newly-released version of General Interface, which they purchased a year ago, and find out just how tightly that it’s integrated with the TIBCO BPM product. In other words, I was on the BPM mashup hunt that I talked about here.
Jeff Kristick, TIBCO’s Director of Product Marketing, gave a presentation where he showed a screenshot of an AJAX-based rich client interface to their BPM product (I would have loved to have seen a demo rather than PPT-ware). I asked if their out-of-the-box UI for BPM was AJAX-based, and he said that they had taken advantage of the acquisition of GI to rebuild their BPM interface using their own AJAX development environment, and that’s what’s shipping now. Cool.
GI is available for free for public applications, and really cheap for enterprise (inside the firewall) applications, so off I went to the TIBCO technical site this afternoon to check it out. Quick signup, wait for a password via email, then off to the download page. I noticed the page of sample projects, each with both a preview and the source code, so thought I’d check these out before installing. Clicked on the first “View Preview” link:
Yikes! You want me to give up Firefox for this? I’m sure that the 45% of my readers who don’t use IE agree with me on this one.
More on GI and the rest of the seminar after I remember where I hid IE…
Sandy– thanks for the note. FWIW–TIBCO’s Firefox edition is in development. We too are also big fans of Firefox. But to put this in perpective, TIBCO General Interface was first released in 2001 targeting internal enterprise deployments — well before Firefox or the term “Ajax” ever existed. Basically we’ve been doing enterprise Ajax behind the firewall for about 5 years where IE was present on 99% of enterprise end users desktops. Now that Firefox 1.5 (just released January of this year 6 years after IE with roughly the same development lanugage featres) now also supports vector graphics through SVG. This bodes well for TIBCO General Interface which has had a vector charting package for the last year based on VML. Yes, today (February-17-2006) GI does not support deployments to Firefox, but support for deploying your GI powered apps on Firefox is well underway and looking very good I must say. Stay tuned for more information on TIBCO General Interface for Firefox.
In the mean time, you can get the IE deployment edition today and you’ll find discussions and can request participation in the beta of the upcoming Firefox release of TIBCO General Interface on the discussion boards at the TIBCO General Interface Developer Community at http://www.tibco.com/mk/gi
Kevin Hakman
Co-Founder General Interface
Director Product Marketing, TIBCO General Interface
TIBCO Software Inc.
Kevin, thanks for your comment. There’s a related thread of comments on Ishmael Ghalimi’s recent post, where I posted a comment pointing out that you were doing an AJAX interface (after he stated that Intalio were the only ones), and he responded by likening your browser-specific solution to Web 1.0 Java applets or Flash animations. I’d be interested to hear your response to this.