What is the development environment for TIBCO Business Works?
I see all these job posts for TIBCO developer but from tibco.com I couldn't really dig what a developer does codewise on this platform because that is geared more towards endusers. Is it a JAVA based platform?
Answer
I'll assume that you are talking about TIBCO Business Works as this is where the majority of the development is done.
TIBCO Business Works is a Java based platform, however normally very little development is done in Java. At it's heart TIBCO Business Works is a XSLT processing engine with lots (and I mean lots) of connectivity components (called Starters and Activities in the TIBCO world).
Development is done graphically by linking the Starter to Activities and eventually to a End Activity, very much like a traditional process diagram. You can see what I mean in the top right of this screen shot:
Each of these diagrams is called a Process Definition and the closest equivalent in Java is a method, however they are more closely related to C functions as there is no concept of a Class for Process Definitions.
Looking closely, you'll notice that the StorePO Publish To Adapter Activity is selected. In the bottom right you can see the input to this activity is "mapped" from other process data (which can be either the output from the Start, or the output from other activities). This mapping is actually XSLT, just represented visually. So much so, that copying the root node of the mapping ("body" in this case) into a text document pastes as XSLT (you can even edit it there and copy it back if you are so inclined; good for when you need to do a search and replace).
Looking back at the Process Definition, there is a CheckInventory Call Process Activity. This is how you invoke another Process Definition from the one you are working on. In fact, this Process Definition has a plain Start Activity, which indicates that it it invoked from another Process Definition.
Starter processes are Process Definitions that have a Process Starter instead of a Start Activity. The Process Starter triggers the invocation of the Process Definition based on some event. For instance, a JMS Queue Receiver Process Starter, will trigger when it receives a specific JMS message. There are many such Process Starters, including SOAP, HTTP, SMTP and even plain old TCP.
Likewise the are many Activities, including the ones above and JDBC and FTP.
Without actually having access to TIBCO Designer, the best way to beef up your skills for a TIBCO role is to focus on XPath and XSLT as that's mostly what you'll be working with.