While most of its Java EE SOA rivals treat .NET interoperability as a matter of exchanging SOAP calls, Tibco is adding native support of Microsoft’s Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) to the next version of ActiveMatrix. The WCF announcement is one of a string that is coming out this week at the company’s annual TUCON user conference. Among other highlights, Tibco is choosing Microsoft Silverlight over Adobe Flex as its Rich Internet browser front-end environment, and it is adding service-level monitoring to ActiveMatrix.

Tibco’s support of WCF is an attempt to reinforce its role of being not Java, not .NET, but the bridge in between. It’s a natural path for one of the few middleware players that don’t bother with an appserver (remember, the company made its name selling busses, not servers). In this case, it’s a matter of Tibco appealing to Microsoft shops by saying, continue to develop your SOA environment using .NET, but simply swap out Microsoft’s MSMQ messaging layer in favor of Tibco’s EMS, which again, is a sort of bridge to JMS. Tibco developed the port of its WCF on its own, but with Microsoft’s endorsement.

Other announcements included the choice of Silverlight. Besides the question of why Tibco chose Silverlight is the one about what happened to Tibco’s existing rich internet application strategy. Namely, its General Interface Ajax tooling. According to Tibco ActiveMatrix product marketing director Rourke McNamara, choice of Silverlight for the product roadmap was not meant to replace General Interface, but supplement it. Also, it was not meant to signify any strategic realignment with Microsoft. “Silverlight doesn't require you to learn a new scripting language,” he said, referring to Action Script, which is used for Adobe Flex. Translation: if you’re already a .NET programmer, you won’t have to learn a new language, and if you’re a Java programmer, well, C# isn’t all that different anyway. To our ears, it sounds more like, being Microsoft’s best-known middleware partner is a great way to distinguish yourself from IBM, Oracle/BEA, and JBoss.

Finally, there’s the addition of service level monitoring, which will be branded as a separate module called ActiveMatrix Service Performance Management. Until now, run time governance has been the domain of ActiveMatrix Policy Manager. As you might recall, Tibco bought SOA monitoring agent technology from AmberPoint several years back. Since then Tibco has repurposed it for Policy Manager, which until now has dealt mainly with routing and access control/authorization matters. The new SLA piece does some clever repackaging of its Tibco Business Events complex event processing (CEP) technology to monitor service performance, taking an approach that SLA monitoring over a distributed bus requires parsing of multiple streams of otherwise disjoint events.

What’s surprising to us is that this is not an addition to Policy Manager, which in our mind is probably where this belongs because how you route, and to whom you allow admittance, is just as much part of run time governance of SOA as SLA monitoring. Tibco will release the new ActiveMatrix Service Performance Management module before the end of June.

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