This is my personal view on the products and in no way represent TIBCO’s official status or strategy for their products.
I have the privilege of working in the Integration team at TIBCO for the past 10 years. It’s an incredible team full of gifted individuals. Recently the team pushed out two of our flagship products – TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks 6.4.0 (BW6) and TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition (BWCE) 2.3.0. In this post I am going to cover a bit about the new features in this release. Read on to know more.
Let’s talk about BW6 first. 6.4.0 has been a minor after some time and here’s a list of important improvements it brings to the product.
Module Properties from Shared Modules
Users can now access module properties defined in the shared modules in there Application Modules. This will allow using the exact same module property for example a user name and password can be defined once in the shared module and used everywhere else.
New Engine Command activity
The Engine Command activity makes a comeback from BW5. Note that this time the node will run more than just one application so use responsibly.
Unit Testing
A new unit testing feature has been added to the product. It allows you to define a new Tests folder, add processes and add assertions to activities that have an output. Read more about it here in the official documentation. This deserves a separate blog post.
XML Improvements
Quite a few improvements are in the product for all you XML geeks out there. BW now support schema includes (obviously with the same targetnamespace) across modules. i.e. now you can have a process or a schema in an Application Module which includes a schema from a shared module.
Migration Improvements
This deserves its own section. BW6 and BWCE have tons of defect fixes for migration and the big feature of converting Design Time Libraries (DTL’s or projlibs in BW5) to shared modules. Read more about it here
The command line migration has also been vastly improved.
Administration and Runtime Improvements
One of my favorite features for 6.4.0 is the ability to download and upload logback files from TEA UI. This now allows users to change logging levels dynamically for app nodes when they don’t have access to the file system. TEA UI has also been enhanced to show which EAR files are deployed so that users can see this in the Archives page itself.
In addition to Telnet, the App Node now also supports SSH to connect and execute OSGI commands. The App Node can also be made to force shutdown after a specified time interval if the user chooses so.
Studio Improvements
Studio is going to feel much snappier and a lot of under the hood improvements have been done for a better user experience. In addition to this a big announcement is the ability to use API specifications designed in TIBCO Cloud Integration API Modeler to implement RESTful services in BW6.
These are just some of the improvements and I highly recommend going through the release notes to get all the details.
In addition to the above enhancements, Businessworks Container Edition has one additional feature to use Embedded policies. More in the release notes here
All these are just some of the new features. There have been quite a few under the hood fixes done in the products to make them feel snappier and improve the user experience. Looking forward towards feedback on community.