Question

It looks interesting and I’ve played around with it some — but the development IDE in a web browser seems to be nightmare eventually.

Does anyone have experience using it and what are your thoughts?

Answer 1

We evaluated GI a few months ago for a project but didn’t end up selecting it.

The IDE-in-a-browser (which is itself build with GI) actually works surprisingly well, though there are some features you normally expect from an editor that it lacks, most notably (and irritatingly) an Undo command. It’s also impossible to do things like subdocument includes (practically a necessity for team development) from the IDE, though you can do them manually in the underlying XML and the IDE will respect them.

In the end the main reason we didn’t go with it was that it was difficult to make the resulting web application look as good as the designers really wanted. It was relatively easy to build functionality, but the components were very restrictive in look and feel. The way GI renders its own document model to HTML involves a lot of style attributes which makes skinning in CSS all but impossible. It seems to prefer making web applications that look like applications, instead of web applications that look like websites.

So it would probably be great for building intranet type applications where look and feel isn’t a huge issue, but I probably wouldn’t use it to make a public facing site.

By the way for those that don’t know, TIBCO GI is a completely separate product from the rest of TIBCO’s SOA business integration stuff – General Interface was a separate company that was acquired by TIBCO a couple of years ago.