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Oh, gee, YA /. Flash discussion, yet again heaploads of non-sense and misconceptions ... Ok, here we go:

Hoi Slashdot.

Veteran Flash Developer here, this is rumor / BS control - here are the facts:

At oh-sixhundred an EEV ... oh, sorry, wrong script ...

1) Flash is by far the most ubiqious end user plattform in existance. Period. It has been for a good decade. Since deployment of Java as end user app delivery method still sucks as much as it did already in 1999 and ActionScript 2 and AS3 have improved the Flash stack in leaps and bounds and are practically indistinguishable for Java in power and versatility, everybody in web technology who has more than two braincells is still betting his money and his pocket cash on Flash as a rich client plattform. All others have failed, and they have failed miserably. Everyone knows why, nobody is learning from it. And thus Flash remains.

And since JavaFX still is the typical Type-A botchjob Sun like do pull when they try to push Java into the appspace it was initially meant for, Flash can stay as crappy as it is and it still has nothing to fear. I wonder if Oracle can change this. They said they'll continue with JavaFX, but that can just so mean they'll continue to screw around like Sun did for 12 years in a row.

2) The web is - if anything - even more diversified than 5 years ago. Mobile doesn't help it. The first Flash Player for Android will have Flash at a solid #1 position again, for another 5 years at least. Not that I really love that, but we have to face the truth ... It will probably even give Android another solid boost vs. iPhone, which, strangely, would actually be a good thing.

3) The FOSS community is pushing Ajax Frameworks with a bizar amount of manhours and developer force, yet for Fonts, Animation and Sound there is no alternative. And if I look at the fuss I have to put up with to get a decent Ajax RIA running across browsers I can tell you this: For anything than the most well planned asynchronous built-to-fit purpose in a single webform, Ajax quickly becomes unbearably cumbersome.

And for tried and true decoupled business apps Tibco Gi is Ajax as about as good as it gets, but needs an experienced devteam to make use of - and then still are there only a few browsers supported. Ergo: Fallback to Flash (or Flex in this case).

4) RIA webapps are square pegs in a round hole. The web is document driven. Yet again and again people are going to try and carve the next nifty thing out of it, no matter what bizar hacks it takes. That's the way we are and it won't change. Not as long as my customers pay me good money to build Flash Applications. The last one took us two years and a team of 25, 7 of which were doing Flash/AS full time on the project. Just to give you an impression of the critical mass advantage Flash has over anything else. MS Silverlight included.

As long as everything else on the web is 10 years behind in enabling something like this, Flash will remain Number One. And no, Chrome with some OpenQL experiments or Ajax/HTML won't cut it. Trust me on this one.

5) Flash is not a security issue. Not compared to anything else on the web. ActiveX is, Flash is not. In fact, Flash has gained inroads in white-collar space based on its extremely conservative approach to security issues. Calling Flash a vector for exploits is just plain silly. Stop doing that, that's bad karma. Flash has other flaws that are plenty enough to rant about.

6) Flash has had serious flaws and shortcomings for 10 years now. Build a FOSS RIA kit that does away with them and Flash is dead in an instant, and the web is ours. Until then quit the non-sense. Ads aren't what drives Flash. Opinion leaders are. And those with the cash. And as long as the best webdesigners on the planet earn no more th

One of my project managers has been using TIBCO Business Studio. It allows nested/linked flow-charts like you were describing and he apparently likes it much better than Visio. It is a free "lite" version of some of their other software. I've (fortunately) never had to do anything like that myself so I can only give second hand advice.

From a user perspective, both our lab techs and engineers have no problems using them. I think that nested flow charts work well on screen, but are not necessarily ideal for printed documentation.

I work in biology, and we use Spotfire DecisionSite to visualize and analyze a lot of our massive genetic data. It's a very powerful program that I barely know how to use. It seems to have packages able to analyze pretty much anything you want, and you can even write your own scripts to help things along.

This meta-article and the whole style of discussion proves it once again in so many ways: To many n00bs claim to much of a say in Web-developenent. Especially among the ones programming a lot but actually knowing squat about web-developement and it's specialties. That something like this goes as an expertise story shows the downside of the field. It's like the entire imature discussion, indifferent raving and bashing about Ajax or RoR or some other recent fad in the field.

To clear a few things up

1) MVC is a construct to describe the most basic setup when using a seperate persistance layer in an end-user application. The concept has been around for at least 15 years and is most certainly *not* limited to web-developement. On contrary, it's basically a relatively simple model for 90ies style GUI DB Apps. For modern web-developement fanatically sticking to MVC is a severe restriction, as in a web-app with seperate persistance, the controller - due to stateless connection to the UI (Browser) - needs to be seperated into at least 2 tiers to make any sense at all, thus turning a pure 3-tier MVC approach into more of a hinderance than a support in webapps.

2) Moving the view layer into client-side logic (if it's in MVC or something else is of no concern) is nothing new. The concept has been around since the dawn of computer networking and is - of course - also a natural progression for web-apps and a growing availability of umbiquious zero-fuss rich-client funtionality (read: non-trivial standardised JavaScript client-server stuff (aka 'Ajax') nowadays works in most Browsers). In many ways the pure server side stuff in web-logic of the last 10 years was an exception and intermediate solution paid for with huge server overhead in order to offer statefull sorta-kinda-GUI-apps in software purpose built for something completely different: Reading documents (aka 'Browsers'). Java was an attempt to get the real thing but it didn't catch on for various reasons. The main being crappy plattform deployment to end-users. That's why - strangely enough for Java enthusiasts - Java still is competing with Flash in that respect.

3) Client-side logic doesn't break MVC. As explained above, MVC has nothing to do wether the app resides on the client, the server or is spread out between. In fact, the most sophisticated frameworks that rely on rich-client functionality do that seperation as the most natural result. Openlaszlo (that which Adope ripped off in Flex) and Tibco GI come to mind as prime examples for that. And both have been around for quite some time now.

As a senior web-developer with solid experience I love the fact that the entire field is very good at regularly offering solid ripostes of result oriented work to any academic arrogance the field of computer science and programming. Thus the ongoing success of PHP-based web-apps. However, it appears that this is taken as an excuse - by professionals just as much as novices - to babble out and present anything they ran accross and haven't fully looked into yet as the newest insight in the field. I sometimes wish people would stop, do some research and then think before they post an opinion that isn't even thought through to the end. Customers and novices interested in the field for whatever reason are confused enough as it is.

My 2 cents.

FWIW-- InfoWorld Labs came to the same conclusion... awarding TIBCO GI "best open source Ajax toolkit" over dojo, GWT, YUI, and all others. (http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/2007/09/116-best_of_open_so-4.html) Upsides of TIBCO GI: Gobs of smart Ajax components and visual rapid dev tools for them! Fast to build Ajax apps...usually business productivity type apps. (Was first released in 2001! Yes 2001 before Mozilla was even a word, less RIA or Ajax). Loads of documentation and resources -- all free under BSD license. (not GPL) Downside: Not for everyone, nor all things Ajax. GI's focus is on apps that are used by business users (thus only IE and FX support now, though the source repo @ http://gi.tibco.com/ has a Sarafi build going that works pretty well in the Webkit nightly build now). With IE and FX you get 99.9% coverage amongst business users, and with Webkit/Safari/etc... other non-business uses may be imminent as well. No Lynx support though ;-) Bottom line: One of the best kept secrets for building Ajax business apps, portlets, and ajaxlets, with rapid development from reusable Ajax components and services (as opposed to adding some Ajax here and there to your HTML pages).

Yeah, that's -great- stuff. I'm sure it'll replace flash, just take a look at the 2 minute explainer.

http://media.tibco.com/flash/gi/tibco_gi_preso.html

Wait... It's in flash. Guess it's not really a competitor.

• Open source (BSD license)
• Free as in beer.
• Free as in liberty.
• Great UI composer
• Built for web service integration
• Lots of nifty online tutorial videos
• Eats its own dogfood: It runs in the browser! (No Java, no activeX, no flying pig aka Eclipse, just DHTML)
• And.. (drumroll, please) NO FLASH!

...might be an alternative for those looking for an AJAX GUI toolkit/IDE as opposed to a Java-based AJAX code generator.
They have several "developer" and "public-display" licenses, although obviously a commercial solution: http://www.tibco.com/software/ria/default.jsp

I too was skeptical about AJAX when I first saw a demo. Given an intuitive IDE you can realise your vision very very quickly. AJAX applications are fast and lightweight. Maintaining them is incredibly easy and the deployment is a cinch.

I admit, I was enthusiastic about Java Swing applets at one point, but they really haven't evolved from the clunky things they were ten years ago. AJAX isn't just a stupid acronym. It's a truly workable system.

For a good IDE check out TIBCO General Interface - it's not open source but it can give you a good idea of what is possible with this technology.

Apple's Rendezvous and Tibco's Rendezvous aren't competing products. IANAL, but I thought that trademark law only applied to the names of competing products and the names of competing businesses. This is just another case of a wacky judge thinking that all things computer are the same. Tibco doesn't even ship a version of Rendezvous for the Mac. Apple isn't pushing their Rendezvous on *nix and Windows users. There's no confusion of the consumer here.

You can check Rendezvous out here.

I think Apple (along with Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, Jabber, and others) ought to slap them right back with a lawsuit for defaming iChat (and other clients). So says the website, "TIBCO Rendezvous is the only messaging software that delivers true real-time publish/subscribe and request/reply messaging." Yeah, maybe that was true in 1994. Maybe.

Tibco's Rendezvous can be used to the do same task as Apple's Rendezvous, i.e. dynamic configuration. They both use multicast and don't require server endpoint configurations like addresses, etc. However Tibco's Rendezvous can also do generic, certified, and transactional messaging and hence Apple's product description does harm by implying Tibco's software has less capabilities, i.e. inferior, to what it really is.

To update the trademark links, Tibco was formally Teknekron:

• Teknekron's trademark - filed July 10, 1995
• Tibco's trademark - filed May 20, 2002
• Apple's trademark - filed May 6, 2002

Not really that interesting, but there is an ongoing dispute over the name Rendezvous.

You can read a little about it here

I thought they meant this one which we use a lot. Now a text editor which talks over the tib would be truly cool, as it would be multiplatform, not just Mac.

Oh well, maybe I should write one :)

I don't know a lot about the state-of-the-art in the area of network discovery/repair other than what I know as a socket-programmer and sysadmin, but I'm wondering if someone who does know can point out the differences between, say, this research and Apple's Rendezvous (not to be confused with Tibco's product by the same name)?

It seems to me that the basic goals are similar, but with Apple focusing more on the engineering side of solving a user-problem rather than passing the point of diminishing returns on "correct" solutions. Please, feel free to enlighten me though. This stuff is actually really promising, and I hope to live in a world 5 years from now where my laptop just "fits in" to the network that it's placed on in more ways than mere DHCP can accomodate.

Thanks!

As has been said, IBM MQSeries / Websphere MQ is available for Linux. So is the granddaddy of all Message Oriented Middleware, BEA MessageQ, formerly known as DECMessageQ. So is BEA Tuxedo. So is Tibco Enterprise. I'm sure there are others but considering that the above four cover something like 99% of the MOM market, whether on Linux or not, it's pretty silly to say there are no MOM products available for Linux.

We have Java clients on the drawing board, but so far all our desktops are Windows. We have our doubts about whether a Java client implementation could make the performance cut. Java performance is ok for most systems, but this system has a *lot* of graphic and network i/o. Can you imagine Quake3 written in Java.

What holds everything together is the middleware from Tibco. We use their Rendezvous system and it kicks a lot of butt. It uses UDP broadcasting or multicasting to send out subject-based Observer pattern updates. It's:

1. fast: 10000 msg/sec
2. mature: developed over 15 years
3. fault-tolerant: process pairs/distributed queues
4. language-independent:C,C++,Java,Perl and Cobol!
5. cross-platform: NT/2K/XP,Solaris,HPUX,Linux

I also recommend using Cygwin, cvs, gnu emacs, samba, rsync and anything else you can find to make Windows as blissfully unix-like as possible.

TIBCO PortalBuilder, which was the initial engine for My Yahoo! and is used by private firms for personalised customer web services.

By the way, you can download TIB/Rendezvous software, which is what most of the big trading floors use to deliver market data to professional traders (the download is a limited version). This is a good way to experiment with multicasting (but you don't get the market data - you have to pay big $ for that).

Sorry. Should have been more specific. It's actually Tibco's Rendezvous product. They used to have a neat Mandelbrot generator set up on their web site to demonstrate, but it seems to be gone now.

Sorry. Should have been more specific. It's actually Tibco's Rendezvous product. They used to have a neat Mandelbrot generator set up on their web site to demonstrate, but it seems to be gone now.

You could try implementing some parallel computing test using some middle ware like Tibco. Tibco is expensive, but it meant for exactly this purpose. There may be other similar middleware applications out there, possibly even Free/Open ones.

JMS is the Java Message Service. ETX is a product from TIBCO; there's also a TIBCO product called Rendezvous, and I presume that's what the original poster meant by "RV". "UDB" is "Universal Database", used in connection with IBM's DB2 database product in its various incarnations.