Design-Time Architecture

At design time, you work with the TIBCO Designer GUI to configure adapter services and design business processes. You design a business process by dragging activities (e.g. Read File or Send Mail) into the design window and joining the activities using transitions. The TIBCO Designer test mode allows you to debug the business process.

You can provide input, add breakpoints, supply values for variables, and so on. For more information, see TIBCO Designer™ User’s Guide.

TIBCO Designer Layout

The TIBCO Designer main window has three or four panels that contain the design-time components of an integration project. You can configure the TIBCO Designer GUI to either display the project and palette panels separately or together. The TIBCO Designer GUI is discussed in more detail in the TIBCO Designer™ User’s Guide.

Figure 14: TIBCO Designer main window

Projects

A project consists of resources that contain the functionality needed for your integration system. This includes services (producers and consumers of information) and any business logic that may be applied to that information.

In TIBCO Designer, you click the project folder to display the project’s resources. The IntegrationProject project, shown in the project tree panel in ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks project and resources, consists of several components:

  • A JMS shared resource (JMSConnection)

  • Two process definitions (ProcessOrder and ShippingSchedule)

  • A shared resource used by the SOAP activity (HTTPConnection)

  • A Siebel adapter and a PeopleSoft adapter (SBLAccount and PSoft_ReqRep)

  • An Enterprise Archive for the project (ProjectArchive)

For a description of the example scenario that was used as the basis for this project. For more information, see Business Integration Scenario .

Figure 15: ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks project and resources

Resources

Resources are the components of a project. A TIBCO Designer resource corresponds to an object in a TIBCO application, such as an FTP activity, a process definition, or a specific adapter instance.

Figure 16: Resources in project tree and design pane

Palettes

Context-sensitive palettes organize resources into related groups. Which palette is displayed depends on the currently opened resource and on your preferences. You drag and drop resources from the palette into the design panel to add them to your project. The main window shown in TIBCO Designer Layout has several palettes in the palette panel.

Note: You can display the palette panel separately from the project panel or together with the project panel. When the palette panel and project panel are combined, a tab named Palettes appears in the project panel that allows you to access the palettes that are currently available. If you wish to display the panels separately, you can modify your viewing preferences on the Edit > Preferences menu.

Enterprise Archive

The Enterprise Archive resource allows you to create an Enterprise Archive file (EAR file) that you can use to deploy the project. The EAR file contains shared archives and process archives that you specify. These archives contain the adapter configurations and process definitions you wish to deploy. After saving the Enterprise Archive file, you can send it to the machine where the TIBCO administration server resides. TIBCO Administrator can use the EAR file to create a deployment configuration.

Note: For more information about creating Enterprise Archive files and deploying projects, see TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™ Administration.