TIBCO Rendezvous is a software product that provides a message bus for enterprise application integration

Enterprise application integration

Enterprise Application Integration is defined as the use of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.- Overview :...

 (EAI).

Details

TIBCO provides messaging API

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

s in C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, Visual BASIC

Visual Basic

Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...

, Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

 and .NET to receive data feeds on MS

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 Excel

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...

 spreadsheets and other applications of choice.

The basic message passing is conceptually simple:

• A message has a single subject composed of elements separated by periods. A message is sent to a single Rendezvous Daemon
  Daemon (computer software)
  In Unix and other multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user...
  
   (though it may end up being broadcast onto Daemons).
• A listener announces its subjects of interest to a Daemon (with a basic wildcard facility) and messages with matching subjects are delivered to it if the two daemons are 'connected' to each other (or indeed the same daemon).

Considerable "Enterprise" functionality is layered onto this if desired with Fault Tolerance/Reliable or Certified options possible, all implemented through the underlying basic messages.

The messages themselves can be viewed as typed name-value fields and/or number-value fields (the two identification mechanisms within a message can mix and match with certain restrictions). A message can itself contain sub-messages which themselves may contain sub-messages, and so on.

The quality of the respective API's implementation varies considerably. The C++ library is simply a wrapper providing an OO view over the C implementation. Likewise the Java and .NET implementations wrap the C++ implementation. This has led to memory management issues with the .NET implementation (though not with the COM Interop version which is considerably more cumbersome).

The TIBCO Messaging Appliance is a hardware-based messaging platform used to accelerate the Rendezvous software. It is based on hardware from Solace Systems

Solace systems

Solace Systems is a content networking company based in Kanata, Ontario, Canada that manufactures and sells middleware appliances. Middleware appliances are rack-mountable network devices that implement message-oriented middleware and content-based routing in purpose-built hardware...

, and uses the standard Rendezvous API.

External links

• TIBCO Rendezvous (Official site)
• TIBCO Rendezvous - Message Board