This morning, when I was getting the latest version of ActiveMatrix installed on my laptop, it occurred to me that I have presented on ActiveMatrix and shown off the products more times than I care to remember and yet have never sat down and tried to explain in written words - why ActiveMatrix and how to use it.
Welcome to my first blog posting on this community. In this series of posts, I want to introduce you to TIBCO’s smashing suite of SOA products, ActiveMatrix, that I promise will slowly grow SCA tendrils around your fingers and have you addicted to building true-blue SOA. In particular I want to show you how easy to use and powerful ActiveMatrix Service Grid and ActiveMatrix Service Bus products can be. I want you to see that it doesn’t matter if you dream in Java or .net or C++ or Ruby or BusinessWorks or …, how you can share code, manage your operational environment and design your enterprise application across the heterogeneity while staying in your own realm. I want you to see how governance works in ActiveMatrix and how that sets apart the applications you build.
But first I’m going to assume you’ve never met ActiveMatrix before and draw a high level picture before we get into the juicy nitty-gritties. I’m a geek at heart but do believe in a top down approach. We will land up exploring building composite applications and mediation services and custom stuff. If you are already a pro, you can always catch me a few posts down the road and we can engage in an active discussion on some of the more advanced topics and learn to use ActiveMatrix together for some of the more complex configurations.
So first…. Why ActiveMatrix for TIBCO and why now? TIBCO, as you must have heard if you have ventured to this blog, has been a leader in the SOA/integration space for eons. BusinessWorks, which has been our core offering for several years, is the basis for our SOA presence and was one of the first products to define SOA to be the way it is today. BusinessWorks has been used by thousands of customers as their SOA and integration backbone. SOA at its heart is all about reusability – if you have existing functionality in an application that can be used in several other applications in your infrastructure, how can you break it down into services that can be called out from these other applications? This is a simplistic explanation of what BusinessWorks helps you with, among a myriad other things. BusinessWorks is a super enterprise service bus – an ESB++ that helps you with service enablement and reuse, integration, orchestration, mediation and management.
TIBCO is a cool company that learns and grows with its customers. One of the primary things we heard from our existing BusinessWorks customers over and again were a few key core needs which forced us to perk up our ears and actively evaluate how we can make their lives easier. And hence was born ActiveMatrix.
What were these messages we heard from our customers?
It’s one thing to use an ESB and leverage reuse, and another to implement enterprise wide SOA and see returns on your investment and manage the complexity and ever present factor of change in IT. Implementing successful SOA involves Governance and SLA management, service virtualization, management of heterogeneity in the infrastructure, availability of a lightweight mediation layer, and the need to continue to leverage a product like BusinessWorks, and co-exist with other implementations of ESBs and SOA solutions, ... the list is endless.
But you do get the message. ActiveMatrix is a vision to provide a platform that your underlying infrastructure can leverage as a basis for resolving all of these IT issues. It should be possible to change governance and compliance needs quickly, skilled technology experts should be able to interoperate without needing to jump in and become experts in other technologies. It's imperative to scale, load balance and provide high availabilty across services quickly and reliably and preferably at runtime without down-time. The business user should not need to have to define business requirements and SLAs in spreadsheets and power point decks that get lost in translation with the technology implementation. Better yet, the SLA requirements should proactively be met without downtime.
Hopefully this paints a picture of the vision behind ActiveMatrix. This is just the tip of the iceberg. In the subsequent posts, we’ll discuss more of these concepts and how you can leverage them in the products with some hands on stuff.
While you are waiting on my next post, I’d encourage you to browse around on our developer network where you can get your hands on a couple of our products ActiveMatrix Service Bus and ActiveMatrix Service Grid: http://developer.tibco.com I’d love to hear your experience with installing these products.
