TIBCO is sponsoring DWR development to help DWR expand and to help accelerate service-oriented, messaging, and event driven web application development. DWR works well in classic 3-tier environments, but also can be a simple means to create JavaScript services that proxy server-side Java objects. In addition, Reverse Ajax in DWR 2.0 serves to provide infrastructure for real-time messages and events on the Web.
There are 3 main areas of work in the TIBCO/DWR collaboration:
TIBCO wants to make the DWR toolkit better for everyone. TIBCO customers are using DWR today and DWR enhances the TIBCO vision of a service oriented, message and event-driven web.
Today you can use DWR alongside GI. Their JavaScript APIs don't conflict at all, but there are a number of ways to make DWR and General Interface work even better together and make developing solutions with both even easier. We are looking at was to automatically fill GI components like data grids, forms, charts and more with data from DWR exported services, and we think it would be great to have a Reverse Ajax JavaScript Proxy API that targeted GI allowing GI to be remote controlled.
When thinking about DWR Services it makes sense to think through the deployment and management of those services.
TIBCO ActiveMatrix is SOA infrastructure for virtualized service deployment and management centered on the SCA standard for SOA with a message bus at its core. By deploying in a bus-based architecture, DWR can more easily tap into not only request/response messages on the bus, but also real-time messages and events, leveraging Reverse Ajax to conceptually extend the bus into the browser for use in businesses productivity solutions.
One of DWR's strengths has always been its integration with other libraries, and we don't see this changing, if anything working with TIBCO is likely to increase the rate at which DWR has a first class integration with libraries like Dojo. TIBCO, Dojo, DWR (through Joe's consultancy, GetAhead) and others are all members of the OpenAjax Alliance whose mission is to create an eco-system for Ajax applications including the ability to mix and match libraries in solutions.