Tibco unveils open-source AJAX mashup tool

Computerworld - Tibco Software Inc. Monday introduced a tool aimed at easing the development of enterprise mashups.

The new Tibco PageBus, which the company describes as an open-source message bus, creates a "publish and subscribe" model that can help users more easily tie together Web services and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) components to create mashup applications.

The message bus aims to do for Web pages what the enterprise service bus does for systems integration by exposing, routing and tying together messages within a service-oriented architecture, said Kevin Hakman, director of developer evangelism at Tibco. PageBus allows different components within an HTML Web page to communicate effectively, he added.

For example, the tool could be used to request a listing of stocks based on a specific criteria -- such as market capitalization -- and then to customize the presentation of that information in a chart or graph, Hakman said.

"For that simple list of stocks, you can pull all this different information and compose these applications much more quickly because they are made of these reusable parts that 'listen' for common kinds of data," he said. "You definitely see a shift to enabling the analysts and the end users to get to the information they want to without having to get into the IT queue."

Tibco also announced that it has donated the core of the PageBus AJAX message bus technology to the OpenAjax Alliance Hub Project, the first specification project of the OpenAjax Alliance. The alliance was created to foster the adoption and interoperability of open-source AJAX technology.

As part of the PageBus launch, Tibco is hosting the Ultimate Mashup Challenge, a contest aimed at using Tibco technology to build the world's largest mashup.