TIBCO ActiveSpaces Reviews & Insights

We are using TIBCO ActiveSpaces for storing user session details. With the help of TIBCO ActiveSpaces we are able to store user session in active memory which helps minimize calls to server for authentication every now and then. This saves time and enables user to login quickly. Apart from user session, we are also storing user role details in TIBCO ActiveSpaces.

TIBCO ActiveSpaces is useful for storing in memory data which enables fetching data quickly and efficiently. We can make use of TIBCO ActiveSpaces APIs for storing and retrieving data. In our organization, we store user session details in TIBCO ActiveSpaces and this session detail is used for authentication and authorizing user. We have integration TIBCO ActiveSpaces with React UI and TIBCO Business Works.

Tibco ActiveSpaces was introduced in our company years back, the original purpose was to add the IMDG caching layer on corporate foundation services to boost the response performance. It is still used together with other Tibco products like EMS, business work, and business events.

TIBCO ActiveSpaces is only suited in the company where Tibco suites have been already used, the license cost is not a concern, it is only required for data caching purposes and only works in the client/server mode for middle-sizes of data. If the expectation is data cache + distributed computation or embedded IMDG is also one requirement or the data cluster needs span multiple data centers, other light-weight OpenSource IMDG solutions should be considered

I work for a telecom company, TIBCO is the only integration tool used within my organization. TIBCO ActiveSpaces was is used in multiple scenarios. One of the first implementations was aimed at speeding up the customer's login and building the customer's dashboard.

TIBCO ActiveSpaces (AS) is used for caching the customer information that is used to build the Customer's dashboard. The following services are cached using TIBCO ActiveSpaces for this purpose:

1. To cache the customer's in-flight orders.
2. To cache all customer's recent interactions (both customer initiated and organization initiated interactions)
3. To cache customer's current product portfolio.
4. To cache customer's account information including last bill amount and payment history.
5. Details about customer's last bill.

This information is mastered in 3 different applications - CRM system for the customer product portfolio, billing system for customer's last bill and account information, inflight orders from an in-house order management system etc.

By using ActiveSpaces customer's login which was sometimes taking up to 7.5 seconds was reduced to 700 milliseconds. Thus improving the customer experience and also saving the individual application resources and their system processes.

1. ActiveSpaces is well suited if, we can generate an event to notify the data has changed in the source. So we can easily use these events to update the cache.

2. Data in ActiveSpaces can either be pre-loaded (eager loading) or loaded when this data is requested (lazy loading). Pre-loading requires considerable time and resources to fetch the data from a source. This may not be a good option unless we can easily bulk load from a source rather than invoking the target application API to load the data one-by-one.

3. Identified the trigger points from the target applications, that could invalidate the data held in ActiveSpaces. So based on the triggers the AS data can be easily be updated.