Phil Bernie Consulting

I’ve been working with a tool called Tibco DataExchange the last couple of weeks and it’s been frustrating. The problem with Tibco DataExchange or “DX” as it’s known is that it’s a development tool, designed to provide a level of abstraction away from the “code” however it provides you with no way to drop back to view the code. It’s just magical fairies in the background doing what it thinks best and I hate it.

I don’t have a problem with visual tools that assist in making coding easier but I do take exception to tools that think they no better than you, and as such, hold you hostage to how they feel like implementing their solution.

A lot of people complain about the “drag and drop” mentality that Microsoft take to a lot of their development tools, however one thing they get right is that their visual tools are often little more than code generators. You can always drop back and work right in with the code.

The same can’t be said for DX.

I’ve worked with many visual tools and the best ones always have the same properties.

1. They excel at the basics and make it easy to leverage them to get up and running quickly so you get a good amount of benefit from them early.
2. They know their limits and get out of the way when you need to start doing some really heavy lifting.

Take a look at any visual tool and the ones you like will have these properties. They do what they do well and once you get to the point where they can’t help you anymore, they get out of the way.

Windows live writer is a good example. It makes writing blog posts dead simple, but if you need to make a custom layout change, you can drop to source view and do it yourself. It shows you exactly what it’s doing under the covers and lets you decide if that’s really what you want

Tibco DX is not a good example. It hides what it’s doing and gives you no way to choose an alternative. Instead you have to hack around the tool and you end up wasting so much time that you lose any initial value you got from allowing it to do the basics.

Given the choice, I’d rather a feature poor tool that got out of the way when it was no longer useful, than a feature rich tool that locked you in and gave you no choice to do it any other way but theirs.