TIBCO NOW 2018: What's New for Devs

Thanks to TIBCO for arranging for me to attend TIBCO NOW 2018 and for the opportunity to meet with Rob Zazueta, Global Director Digital Strategy at TIBCO. Rob was with Mashery when it was acquired by TIBCO three years ago and he's a huge developer advocate. In fact, he organized a data challenge using Spotfire and FloGo for developers attending the user conference.

Rob believes developers learn by breaking stuff and fixing it. That's also how they evaluate the tools they use for their jobs. Use your own data or sources, get errors, figure out why something is wrong, go back and fix it. That's the best way to learn.

Rob sees a transition from IT ops owning the ops side of the business. With the cloud, DevOps, and CI/CD a lot of IT ops should be redefining their job. IT ops have a reputation for being the department of "no" while developers are driven to say, "yes." A platform facilitates this and enables IT ops to be more of a services organization for developers. IT ops should be taking what’s in place and opening up as an API platform so developers can find what they need to get documentation in a self-service environment.

Developers are able to onboard faster with a platform. It also enables experimentation with different technologies. This provides the opportunity for developers to learn something new and interesting to address the problem at hand. Developers can containerize and document with the platform to eliminate risk. Focus on optimizing and scaling at a small individual service level.

Developers are interested in getting the job done.  We need to provide the APIs to do so.

I asked Rob what he thought the DZone audience would be most interested in coming out of TIBCO NOW 2018. He identified four things that he's excited about:

• FloGo — "The more I play with it and learn, the more I realize how powerful it is. FloGo allows me to create powerful iterations and data flows with little programming that can run practically anywhere on any device with cross-compilation thanks to small binaries – less than an MB. When we're talking about devices and MQTT protocols, we're just starting to understand and see value. It's hard to connect and wrap our head around. It can be a bit of a barrier. FloGo eliminates the barrier."
• API Scout — "Solves the discoverability issues. You may start with a handful of services in K8s, but those services quickly expand to dozens, hundreds, and thousands. This exposes a problem with SOAs -- API discoverability. I need to understand what’s there so I can use it or shut it down. Event-driven APIs can live in a sidecar pattern or within the services and communicate with a master gateway."
• TIBCO Labs' Project Cloud Conversations — "Solve big problems that are not easy to solve. It enables you to have a conversation with enterprise data by using NLP to query data. The conversational UI enables non-technical and non-data people to get specific results. You get conversational short-cuts and it never tires of answering questions."
• TIBCO Labs' Project Dovetail – "We've been looking at blockchain for one year. Nelson Petraeek (Global CTO at TIBCO) is a blockchain subject matter expert. Dovetail is proof he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the blockchain. Ethereum and smart contracts are the future of distributed trusted computing. It's not just enforcing contracts, smart contracts are code. The concept of FaaS move to smart contracts on blockchain has massively distributed compute power running these services. Users have to pay a certain amount of Ethereum to run these transactions which are distributed across every server on the blockchain compute system. That’s where the power of blockchain exists. However, there's no standardization. I know of three languages in Ethereum. Dovetail rises above and helps develop smart contracts in a simple manner. It abstracts away the complexity and provides resilience to last as long as you need. This reduces the barrier to adopting a new technology. Dovetail is the beginning of a platform for blockchain like TIBCO built for IoT and big data."

Rob wrapped up with this, "Like most developers, I like to code but not the same things over and over again. Managing flows and communications for MQTT. Focus on business logic, connectivity, UX. TIBCO abstracts away the repetitive stuff allowing me to focus on what interests me."