14 DAY TRIAL // TIBCO has revealed via a press release the immediate availability for download of General Interface version 3.2, currently in beta stage. Delivered with either a free open source BSD license or a TIBCO enterprise license complete with support, guaranties and indemnity, TIBCO has announced that it will post General Interface version 3.2 source code once the product is out of beta.
"What PowerBuilder did to accelerate the use of relational data base systems in the 1980's, TIBCO aims to do for SOA, through General Interface and its SOA products," said Kevin Hakman, director, product marketing, TIBCO General Interface. "Offering TIBCO General Interface under an open source license broadens the availability of our proven enterprise-class AJAX RIA libraries and visual tools to an even larger group of developers and organizations."
The upgraded TIBCO AJAX Rich Internet Application (RIA) toolkit does not only provide an open source licensing option, but also compatibility with Firefox 1.5, and additionally, a bundling of service-oriented architecture (SOA) with Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technology.
"Bringing RIA and SOA together makes sense at a programmatic level as they share the same underlying principles. Specifically, the asynchronous model in AJAX is very similar to the ESB [Enterprise Service Bus] model," said Mark Driver, vice president and research director, Gartner, Inc. "By connecting RIA on the front end to services on the back end, it brings the possibility of service reuse into a vendor-neutral client tier and the potential to deliver significantly more powerful client applications to the browser."