TIBCO's Cache
Rating: 9 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
I work for a telecom company, TIBCO is the only integration tool used within my organization. TIBCO ActiveSpaces was is used in multiple scenarios. One of the first implementations was aimed at speeding up the customer's login and building the customer's dashboard.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces (AS) is used for caching the customer information that is used to build the Customer's dashboard. The following services are cached using TIBCO ActiveSpaces for this purpose:
1. To cache the customer's in-flight orders.
2. To cache all customer's recent interactions (both customer initiated and organization initiated interactions)
3. To cache customer's current product portfolio.
4. To cache customer's account information including last bill amount and payment history.
5. Details about customer's last bill.
This information is mastered in 3 different applications - CRM system for the customer product portfolio, billing system for customer's last bill and account information, inflight orders from an in-house order management system etc.
By using ActiveSpaces customer's login which was sometimes taking up to 7.5 seconds was reduced to 700 milliseconds. Thus improving the customer experience and also saving the individual application resources and their system processes.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces (AS) is used for caching the customer information that is used to build the Customer's dashboard. The following services are cached using TIBCO ActiveSpaces for this purpose:
1. To cache the customer's in-flight orders.
2. To cache all customer's recent interactions (both customer initiated and organization initiated interactions)
3. To cache customer's current product portfolio.
4. To cache customer's account information including last bill amount and payment history.
5. Details about customer's last bill.
This information is mastered in 3 different applications - CRM system for the customer product portfolio, billing system for customer's last bill and account information, inflight orders from an in-house order management system etc.
By using ActiveSpaces customer's login which was sometimes taking up to 7.5 seconds was reduced to 700 milliseconds. Thus improving the customer experience and also saving the individual application resources and their system processes.
Pros
- Tibco ActiveSpaces is an excellent caching tool. With good design, we can haven a efficient cache layer, that can respond to business needs in sub-seconds (milliseconds) rather than seconds / minutes to respond. This is specially useful for improving the efficiency of the services used in customer interactions.. like login, serving billing information, serving the customer's service usage and any other information customer is interested in accessing frequently.
- System process can also use the ActiveSpaces . By caching the information frequently used by the system processes, the data cab be accessed more frequently. And without much disruptions.
- If you are already using TIBCO tools, then ActiveSpaces is the right choice to use, as the product is well integrated with all the TIBCO Suite of products. ActiveSpaces integrates well with most common products like TIBCO BusinessWorks, TIBCO BusinessEvents etc.
- ActiveSpaces can be easily deployed to a target (TIBCO) environment, with very little additional effort. Although there is an effort required to deploy them.
- ActiveSpaces is supported by TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.13 and TIBCO BusinessWorks 6.x. Hence you are not forced to use any version of TIBCO BW, just because you have to use TIBCO ActiveSpaces.
Cons
- ActiveSpaces 3.2 is not compatible with the latest version of TIBCO Business Event 5.x. And ActiveSpaces 2.x is not compatible with ActiveSpaces 3.x hence there is a big difference in the BusinessEvents supported version of AS and the latest.
- ActiveSpaces takes more disc space and TIBCO does not offer data compression logic out of the box. Developers need to do extra coding to use java snippets to compress and decompress the payload. Although the data compression gives must better performance and speed to the system.
- The compression and decompression API are not offered by TIBCO out of the box, which is a shame. These are so easy and simple to implement, still TIBCOdoes not provide them as an option out of the box.
Likelihood to Recommend
1. ActiveSpaces is well suited if, we can generate an event to notify the data has changed in the source. So we can easily use these events to update the cache.
2. Data in ActiveSpaces can either be pre-loaded (eager loading) or loaded when this data is requested (lazy loading). Pre-loading requires considerable time and resources to fetch the data from a source. This may not be a good option unless we can easily bulk load from a source rather than invoking the target application API to load the data one-by-one.
3. Identified the trigger points from the target applications, that could invalidate the data held in ActiveSpaces. So based on the triggers the AS data can be easily be updated.
2. Data in ActiveSpaces can either be pre-loaded (eager loading) or loaded when this data is requested (lazy loading). Pre-loading requires considerable time and resources to fetch the data from a source. This may not be a good option unless we can easily bulk load from a source rather than invoking the target application API to load the data one-by-one.
3. Identified the trigger points from the target applications, that could invalidate the data held in ActiveSpaces. So based on the triggers the AS data can be easily be updated.