Tibco Announces Sponsorship of DWR

Posted by Scott Delap on Jan 10, 2007 08:18 AM

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Java

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Web Frameworks

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DWR,

AJAX,

Tibco

TIBCO Software, Inc. which open sourced their General Interface Ajax Toolkit last year, has announced that they will be sponsoring Joe Walker's development of the popular DWR Java library for writing Ajax applications. From the press release:

TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) today announced that it has become a sponsor of Direct Web Remoting (DWR), the popular Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) communications library ... TIBCO will work with DWR founder, Joe Walker, to provide ready-made integration points between DWR and TIBCO General Interface™, TIBCO’s Ajax Rich Internet Application toolkit for creating rich graphical GUIs in a browser. Additionally, the collaboration will seek to extend DWR so that it can function as a Java Business Integration (JBI) standard service engine and be deployed on TIBCO ActiveMatrix™, the industry’s first service virtualization platform. The complementary components of DWR and General Interface™ will ultimately enable businesses to expand their uses of message and event-based service-oriented architectures.

“We are excited to be working with TIBCO to push adoption of DWR further into the enterprise,” said Joe Walker, DWR founder. “DWR has been a leading Ajax framework for some time but working with TIBCO will help take DWR further into the realm of full Ajax Rich Internet Applications being deployed alongside message and event-driven service platforms.”

With substantial application modernization efforts underway and a continued trend towards SOA in business, the combined Ajax libraries of General Interface and DWR will provide capabilities that deliver rich user features such as editable grids, real-time events and notifications, and streaming data. By running on Internet technology rather than operating or runtime environment dependent technologies, businesses will experience much lower costs of ownership.

“DWR is a rapid way for Java developers to expose Java objects as simple Ajax services without the need for additional configuration or transformation. We have many customers already using DWR with the General Interface Ajax library,” said Kevin Hakman, director product marketing, TIBCO General Interface. “With DWR’s reverse Ajax capability, messages and events can be pushed from the server to the browser so that Web applications can also have real-time notification and streaming data features.”

InfoQ caught up with Joe Walker to discuss the partnership. In regards to where the line be drawn between DWR and General Interface Walker replied:

Exactly where it is now. TIBCO GI remains a UI toolkit with SOAP integration, DWR remains a remoting library. There is no plan to merge the frameworks or have any dependencies on each other. However if you are using DWR and GI on the same page then your job will get easier.

InfoQ then asked about the real world ramification of the agreement:

DWR will benefit from the extra time I get to spend on it, and it should get some great links into GI if you are using GI. GI users will get another way to talk to Java. DWR has a great server-side version of Scriptaculous Effects which uses Reverse Ajax, and we'd like to create a server-side version of GI too. We'll also be working on JBI integration which should help any developers working with event and message based SOA.

Walker was also asked how working with TIBCO will effect DWR integration with other toolkits and technologies such as GWT, Dojo, etc:

I expect it will only strengthen them. Creating a server-side version of TIBCO GI by hand would be a huge undertaking, so I hope we can create some tools to save some of the hand cranking. We plan to make full use of these tools when integrating DWR with libraries like Dojo, etc.

DWR will remain a separate open source project created by a team of people, and I remain employed by Getahead so DWR users could be blissfully unaware that anything had changed except that I'll get more time to work on DWR. Dojo, TIBCO and DWR are all members of the OpenAjax Alliance which has interoperability as one of it's key goals, so I don't see this as hurting anyone.

Walker also provides further details on his blog.

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