By offering an open source licence, developers will be able to freely use and extend Tibco General Interface to more easily combine and leverage the capabilities of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technology, the company says.

Says Marco Gerazounis, Tibco SA country manager: "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. Offering Tibco General Interface under an open source licence broadens the availability of our enterprise-class Ajax RIA libraries and visual tools to an even larger group of developers and organisations."

The value of service-oriented IT systems, ranging from simple XML and Web services to large scale managed SOA, can be greatly enhanced by implementing Ajax RIAs at the presentation tier, he adds.

For customers already transitioning to SOA - Tibco General Interface is designed to connect end-users directly to re-usable data services and business processes through feature-rich graphical user interfaces accessed instantly through the Web browser to extract greater value from existing investments

For customers just beginning to leverage services-oriented concepts - Tibco General Interface works with simple services exposed through the Web-based systems already in place, the company says.
 
"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 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) model," says Mark Driver, vice-president and research director at Gartner. "By connecting RIA on the front end to services on the back end, it brings the possibility of service re-use into a vendor-neutral client tier and the potential to deliver significantly more powerful client applications to the browser."