« Tibco GI? No thanks

Recently we tried TIBCO GI, I’ve to say that I’ve not been particularly happy with it, here is my list of cons:

• Not easy to test: impossible to test headless (is not supported by htmlunit), impossible to test with webdriver: Tibco provides a “Test Automation Kit”, however we had to write an extension of SeleniumServer in order to be able to write SeleniumRC from java… Pretty bad!
• It couples java, xml and javascript: yes it does, you write your objects in java, you configure them in xml and in the end you write some javascript that calls theirs java methods, a maintenance (and team on-boarding) mess!
• Yet another tool: to edit the UI there’s no plugin for Eclipse, you’ve to use a TibcoGI tool to edit the UI… Pretty bad!
• Small community: I found the community pretty small and completely unaware of the modern testing techniques (webdriver & htmlunit to start with)
• XML, XSL and Javascript: at the end it’s all about these three technologies, all together, a scary combination.
• Some browser are supported, some others.. No comment

Pros?

Well, you can write very quickly a pretty web interface but why not considering flex then?