View Exclusive SYS-CON.TV Interview with TIBCO GI Co-Founder Kevin Hakman at AJAXWorld 2006 Anyone wishing to get a technical insight into some of the ways the TIBCO General Interface team, which has been in the AJAX business for 5 years now, has architected the product, can now peek at the fully commented and unobfuscated source code.
When TIBCO General Interface 3.2 was released earlier this month under the rather liberal BSD open source license, the intention was to enable developers to use and deploy the product at no cost under the terms of the BSD license.
Now TIBCO has taken the next step, bundling the fully commented and unobfuscated JavaScript source with the product download so that it can serve as a reference to those that really want to get in under the hood and see what makes GI tick.
TIBCO also states on the GI download page that implementing a full open source eco-system will occur in phases.
- Phase 1: Source code is provided with the download for use as a reference. The product and its source are free to use under a BSD license; Full support, warranty, and more is offered under separate TIBCO agreements.
- Phase 2: Source compilation, compression and obfuscation tools will be provided so that you can generate optimized runtime code for multiple platforms from your modifications to the source.
- Phase 3: Community contributions under separate contributor agreements for those that want to contribute their good stuff.
"Developers wanting to create modifications and extensions to the GI libraries can now do so more easily with access to the fully commented source," noted Kevin Hakman, TIBCO GI Co-Founder and upcoming AJAXWorld Conference & Expo speaker in March 2007.
"However," Hakman continued, "close inspection of the source will reveal that the raw JavaScript source can also be run through a 'pre-compiler' that compresses, obfuscates, and generates separate runtimes for each of the supported browsers."
That pre-compiler, he added, won't be out until Phase 2 of the open source implementation process.
"In effect the source code has forks in it for various browser types, but the pre-compiler generates optimized code for a single browser, thus increasing performance and shrinking the footprint while packing in lots of capabilities," Hakman said.