I cannot understand what is so special about Tibco.
Their marketing material stresses that TCP is a pessimistic transport protocol which does not require client acknowledgement of receipt. How can this be true?
To me Tibco is basically a TCP protocol backed by a queue.
Can someone please help me understand the main selling points of Tibco? I am about to have a rant to my manager telling him we are being completely ripped off here.
The added value is supposed to be the "reliable multicast" and platform-independence. The whole architecture with rvd in the middle of everything is sort of stupid, so in my opinion you are being ripped off, just like us here, and everybody else paying them :)
I'm assuming that you're going to be using RV (Rendezvous) as that is their main messaging protocol.
This is a UDP-based broadcast-like protocol which is faster than TCP, but still doesn't necessarily have client acknowledgment.
There are configurations of it that do support it (certified messaging,) so whether it's TCP vs. UDP, it's really up to what you're trying to do with it.
The value that Tibco (BusinessWorks) adds is that it provides a simple, straightforward middleware application designer and makes it simple to deploy apps in a load balanced and fault tolerant environment. It gives you all sorts of connectors (soap, http, jdbc, jms etc.) to hook up to what you need and spit it out an many different formats.
It would help if we had more info about what sorts of things you'll be using it for.
ps. instead of RV, go with EMS (a JMS implementation.)
RV vs. EMS:
It really depends on who you are and what your goals are. My familiarity with TIBCO is that it was a messaging system used by many of our competitors in financial services industries to send messages securely from web-based front ends back to mainframe for processing, and to deliver things such as stock quotes to our front end.
We had our own messaging product which bore a strange resemblance to a messaging product that one of the higher-ups in our company previously worked at :)
We had a 300 million technology budget, but keep in mind we also had 2 large datacenters and several production centers, as well as 3 offices for development.
Now, a company in our situation might find it a good deal to use something like TIBCO out of the box (we could probably have saved a substantial chunk of that 300 million).
If you don't have that kind of budget and your demands are much less, then for you it might indeed be a "ripoff". But, to develop that kind of system yourself, for an organization such as the one I worked at ... I'm sure it would use a substantial chunk of that 300 million.