Addressing a Big New Audience: VMware Acquires WaveMaker |
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Today, VMware announces with this blog the acquisition of WaveMaker, a widely used graphical tool that enables non-expert developers to build web applications quickly. While WaveMaker is already part of the Spring ecosystem, it will now become an integral part of the Spring family and VMware’s cloud strategy. All of WaveMaker’s staff will be joining VMware.
This acquisition furthers VMware’s cloud application platform strategy by empowering additional developers to build and run modern applications that share information with underlying infrastructure to maximize performance, quality of service and infrastructure utilization.
Where It Fits In
Over the last 8 years, Spring has made building Java applications dramatically easier. The first wave of Spring adopters were advanced developers who understood the previous generation EJB technology in detail and sought a superior replacement. In some cases, they became Spring developers themselves. The next wave were mainstream business application developers focused on implementing business requirements, without specialist knowledge of infrastructure. As the Spring community grew further to several million, and Spring was mandated as the development solution in more and more organizations, it grew to embrace developers with a wide range of skills. Each version of Spring made applications simpler and reduced the amount of code and configuration required; the emergence of Grails and Spring Roo also helped streamline the daily work of developers at all skills levels.
We’ve always had a great story for professional software developers. However, not all business applications are written by specialist developers. For example, anyone who’s worked in the financial services industry knows how much functionality is implemented by business people using Excel spreadsheets. Particularly in the case of web applications, many solutions can be delivered or pulled together from other components by business developers—dashboards, for example.
The Vision
I’ve always believed that we should eventually provide Spring-based technology to enable less technical users to build such applications, increasing the value of the Spring platform and enabling many business problems to be solved most cheaply. In practice, this means introducing visual tooling to take the place of coding, in areas (such as UI design) where automation is possible. Done right, such automation can even benefit professional developers, for certain classes of application.
Enter WaveMaker.
WaveMaker is a proven, browser-based visual tool for building Spring applications.
With WaveMaker we can create a unique opportunity for coding and non-coding developers to collaborate on the Spring platform, providing large business value.
Traditionally the Achilles heel of such approaches is that the visual tooling produces applications that developers won’t want to hand edit—meaning that once the non-technical staff hit a wall and need further modifications to the application, specialist developers can’t help without reimplementing the application from scratch.
We chose WaveMaker because with it, we can avoid this problem. A WaveMaker application is a Spring application. Going forward, we will ensure that WaveMaker applications keep up-to-date with Spring best practices and innovations.
Like Spring, WaveMaker is open source and has a growing community. Over the last 12 months it’s seen a dramatic upswing in adoption, with 135K downloads per month. Let me be the first to welcome the WaveMaker community into the SpringSource family and to encourage the SpringSource community to take a look at how to get started with WaveMaker.
What Next?
We’re excited about the future. Some of the highlights you can expect:
- Close alignment with Spring Roo will ensure consistent architecture between Spring Roo and WaveMaker applications and enable developers to work on WaveMaker applications at three levels: in traditional code-only style; in code-oriented fashion turbo-charged by Spring Roo; and with the WaveMaker graphical environment. This will be a uniquely compelling set of choices.
- WaveMaker as a service will fit naturally with our cloud computing strategy, including Code2Cloud.
- Currently WaveMaker builds applications using as inputs database tables and web service endpoints. We have lots more Spring goodness to work with. We will enrich this functionality through exposing many other features of Spring, such as Spring Integration and Spring Social endpoints, along with other cloud services.
This is going to be a big year for Spring and VMware cloud-related technologies. With the WaveMaker acquisition, we’ll be able to bring the impact of our new technologies to an even larger audience.
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Hussain says:
Added on March 8th, 2011 at 1:32 pmWhat will happen to STS? is it going to merge with Wave Maker, and is spring source going to remove or change current pricing of wave maker? I'm quite excited about this acquisition.
DR says:
Added on March 8th, 2011 at 3:21 pmWill the pricing model change? Because right now, the way it's priced means that it's not cost-effective for customer-facing applications (it's also tough to sell to CTOs for internal use, to be very honest). I know someone will reply that you can use the community edition for free, but it has far too many limitations to be useable except by small start-ups.
If the pricing model stays as is, I'm afraid I'll have to forgo even looking at it, since I know it will never be accepted by my employers.
afitzgerald (blog author) says:
Added on March 8th, 2011 at 5:03 pm@Hussain: This move does not directly impact STS. We are still committed to creating the best development tools to assist Spring and Grails developers – they are the specialist developers Rod refers to in his blog.
@Hussain and @DR: Regarding any pricing changes, the commercial WaveMaker offering will be integrated into the VMware/SpringSource developer subscription and some of the commercial product functionality will be incorporated into the open source version in upcoming releases. Please contact your VMware/SpringSource/WaveMaker account rep if you are an existing customer or email sales@wavemaker.com to get to discuss your requirements.
Mark says:
Added on March 8th, 2011 at 6:57 pmGreat post. Honestly, this is my first time reading WaveMaker. I haven't seen it before nor even heard of it. Without this blog, I wouldn't even know that such tool exist. Particularly I like this idea: "Traditionally the Achilles heel of such approaches is that the visual tooling produces applications that developers won’t want to hand edit—meaning that once the non-technical staff hit a wall and need further modifications to the application, specialist developers can’t help without reimplementing the application from scratch"
Oscar Serrano says:
Added on March 9th, 2011 at 6:34 amWhich javascript framework is used by WaveMaker to render widgets/gadgets? dojo? jquery? prototype? none of them?
Thanks.
Bob says:
Added on March 9th, 2011 at 12:00 pmThe About Us section of the WaveMaker corporate website lists Mitchell Kertzman, former CEO of Powersoft at Sybase, as an investor and Board of Directors member. In 1992 Sybase acquired Powersoft, the leading maker of development tools for client-server computing. Through that deal, Sybase acquired PowerBuilder. In other words (this is my interpretation), WaveMaker is a glorified PowerBuilder, that under the covers uses Spring technology.
Reading between the lines, Spring (in my personal opinion) is having trouble finding a coherent strategy to make enough money to justify the $340 million that VMware paid to acquire Spring.
Mark says:
Added on March 9th, 2011 at 2:42 pm@Bob – having used PowerBuilder and Spring/STS/Roo/Grails (a little) – it is MUCH more than a glorified PB. As with everything, everyone wants you to be all things to all people. I think this is just part of the vision and builds on the Spring foundation – a good foundation.
That being said, the problem with tools like WaveMaker that target the non-techies is that building the software is only part of the job, even if it is built on Spring. Gathering requirements, understanding that an app is more than a screen tied to a database table… .
Bob says:
Added on March 9th, 2011 at 4:00 pm@Mark, before I became a java developer, I was a full time Borland Delphi Pascal developer for several years. (I never used PowerBuilder however). Back in those days PowerBuilder and Microsoft VB and Borland Delphi were the big 3 players in the desktop space on PCs. It was easy with any of them to write glorious visual apps.
Then when the web become more prominent the big players became Cold Fusion and Microsoft ASP.
And then, of course, JSP came along and the rest is history.
One thing does seem more clear now– the reason why Spring has been ignoring MyEclipse for Spring as if ME4S has leprosy. Clearly, WaveMaker and MyEclipse for Spring are directly competing.
Meanwhile, the bread and butter that made Spring respected and adopted is not being given the attention it deserves and needs. I am specifically referring to the really shoddy, second class treatment that the venerable Spring reference manual is receiving from Spring ever since version 3.0. Try reading the Spring reference manual starting on page one and see how far you get until you conclude that nobody at Spring is actually reading it themselves, or they would not allow it to be so poorly edited. By contrast, the Spring reference manual back in the old days used be a fun, very interesting read that was organized and well written and carefully edited.
afitzgerald (blog author) says:
Added on March 9th, 2011 at 4:20 pm@Bob Thanks for your opinions. If you want to discuss the the state of the Spring reference manual or provide recommendations for improving it, please add your comments to either the Meta group (http://forum.springsource.org/forumdisplay.php?f=34) in the forum or to the core Container group (http://forum.springsource.org/forumdisplay.php?f=26).
Mark says:
Added on March 9th, 2011 at 5:57 pm@Bob – not sure what VB and Delphi have to do with it. But i did VB too (I have an MCP). VB (and PowerBuilder) were easy to get started. But "glorious" visual apps were difficult (PB was "better") and apps of any complexity were difficult to maintain. They needed a lot of what Spring has to offer.
I've done CF, ASP and JSP too. Same issue.
As for Spring "ignoring" MyEclipse – well I don't really know what is going on there. But MyEclipse is a pay-for IDE (STS is not) and MyEclipse does not have anything like WaveMaker that i can tell. MyEclipse is more like STS.
Kris says:
Added on March 9th, 2011 at 6:26 pmA little off topic here but seeing some comparison to MyEclipse & STS I thought I would bring this up here – One of the things STS lacks is the rich IDE support that MyEclipse provides. SpringMVC is a very elegant framework but there is a lot of ceremony that a developer has to participate in to get some basic functionality going. I compare SpringMVC with ASP.NET MVC. Both of them help me accomplish the same thing but I am far more productive in the Visual Studio environment. An IDE like MyEclipse definitely helps to some extent but STS surely lags far behind. I have not played with Roo, may be it could do all the things via command line. When you compare frameworks like Grails/Rails which provide a productivity boost to the developer, a framework like SpringMVC without adequate tooling really slows down the productivity.
Bob says:
Added on March 9th, 2011 at 6:38 pm@Mark, we don't want to get too off topic here. Tonight at home I will download WaveMaker into an Ubuntu 10.04 guest running under VMware Fusion and give it a whirl. In looking at the WaveMaker install instructions, I noticed there is an invitation-only beta of WaveMaker Cloud Edition that allows you to use WaveMaker without installing any software on your computer. That sounds interesting.
I agree with you that ME4S is more like STS. The $159 I paid for ME4S is roughly comparable to the fee I pay for an Apple IOS developer yearly membership and is a fair price for a more polished and flexible IDE than STS, for things like CRUD generation with or without Maven.
Artur Karazniewicz says:
Added on March 10th, 2011 at 12:37 amFor me SpringSource strategy is pretty clear here. Building full stack cloud offering. And this is perfect piece in this puzzle. It's direct competitor to salesforce force.com and their APEX platform. It has actually nothing to do with roo or grails. It's just a tool for different audience. Same thing with force.com. One one side they provide their visual PaaS tools (apex) and at the same time they try to enter into full blown PaaS application offering (Heroku, VMFroce). That's it. And it's pretty inline with where market is heading now.
I don't even uderstand why people compare this to roo, Grails or MyEclipse.
Good move SpringSource, BTW
Bob says:
Added on March 10th, 2011 at 8:02 amI owe the readers of my comments an apology, because I really should have waited to try WaveMaker before expressing my opinions. Last night I installed WaveMaker on an Ubuntu 10.04 guest and watched 6 WaveMaker tutorials. This morning I fired up WaveMaker and created my first application. With this experience under my WaveBelt, I can confidently say that WaveMaker knocked my socks off. Absolutely fantastic. I have never seen anything like it. A killer application. One click of a button and it makes a working Tomcat application. And it does everything inside a Chrome browser (or Firefox too, I guess; I was using Chrome). WaveMaker, it seems to me after trying it, is a revolutionary product that anybody who uses it will fall over backwards singing the praises of. Wow.
surajz says:
Added on March 10th, 2011 at 9:43 am@Bob.
Encouraging comment. I am also planning to try it over the weekend.
Neal says:
Added on March 10th, 2011 at 12:56 pm@Bob
)
I chanced upon wavemaker googling one day six months or so ago and was blown away like you. And did wonder at that point why nobody ever took wavemaker seriously. Did chat with a few friends at work and nobody had ever heard of it!
The marriage between spring roo and wavemaker would be a good one imo and looking fwd to using them together(well hopefully roo will mature soon with multi-module capabilities – I hear in 1.2 version- and won't be so against a services layer
Ken Rimple says:
Added on March 10th, 2011 at 1:29 pm@Oscar – the Javascript toolkit used is the Dojo toolkit.
Mark says:
Added on March 10th, 2011 at 10:29 pmMake sure you all look the Java services video. Also, i did some googling and here is a link for injecting web services – http://dev.wavemaker.com/wiki/bin/Dev/JDBC#HGettingJDBCConnectionfromJava
I think from those two things it should be pretty easy to reuse Spring Services.
Rohit says:
Added on March 11th, 2011 at 9:21 pmInteresting – can't wait for the first release !
I did all the Wave Maker tutorials and it felt good.
My team works on Spring and ROO very extensively , they saw it – they did not feel good (as expected) but I guess it's too early to feel anything.
It would interesting to see how much this development can help core Spring and ROO developers (like my team).
There should be something for them too !
Time will tell.
cheers !
rohit
Bob says:
Added on March 12th, 2011 at 5:05 pmInformationWeek's John Foley interviewed Wavemaker's CEO Chris Keene on March 22, 2008. That 5 minute interview is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48uoyWx1B2A At the end of the interview John Foley says that WaveMaker was actually founded as "Active Grid" in 2003. Foley then says "Active Grid" was rebranded and relaunched in November, 2007 as WaveMaker.
During the 2008 interview, John Foley asked Chris Keene about the licensing model. Chris Keene replied (in 2008), "WaveMaker is licensed under open source. So, given that we use so much open source, we decided it would be a little hypocritical if we didn't do the same ourselves. So, WaveMaker is free to develop in, free to deploy, and it's licensed on a per JVM basis for subscription support."
Support in the WaveMaker Community Edition for JNDI connections to a DataBase was removed in version 6.2. The current version is 6.2.5GA as of March 12, 2011. JNDI is only currently only available in the Enterprise edition.
The price list for the Enterprise edition is currently replaced (as of March 12, 2011) with a page announcing the Spring Acquisition of WaveMaker. By using Google caching however, the price list as of May 2, 2011 can still be seen. The Google cache shows that the least expensive configuration on May 2 was $595 for: WaveMaker Enterprise Edition, 1 developer seat, 1 training seat, 1 server deployment for 5 licensed users, and First year maintenance. Each additional developer seat (as of May 2, 2011) was $395, "Only available as an add-on to the Enterprise Bundles".
Oscar Serrano says:
Added on March 13th, 2011 at 12:28 pmHi,
so, if Wavemaker rests on Dojo… How can if fit in our already started web apps which rest on JQuery for the presentation layer? Can Wavemaker be used in a project based on JQuery? Is there any intention to mutate Wavemaker as to it generate JQuery code?
With the so violent war we all have fougth in the javascript framewoks, resulting JQuery as the clear winner, I cannot understand why Spring now bets on Dojo… we are sick of learning new Javascript frameworks.
Please make Wavemaker work with JQuery.
Thanks.
Malamut says:
Added on March 15th, 2011 at 12:50 pmJquery integration into Wavemaker :
http://dev.wavemaker.com/wiki/bin/Dev/jQuery
Mark says:
Added on March 15th, 2011 at 1:55 pmUpdate: I did a quick little app. And it was VERY easy to reuse existing Spring Services. Note: My Entity classes, Service interfaces and Service implementations were all in separate jars. So i just grabbed the entity and interface jars and dropped them in the WM lib directory. Then I copied the bean definitions (Spring Remoting beans) from an existing xml file into one of the WM Spring xml files and injected my service into the WM Java service. My existing Java services were running on another Tomcat instance on a server.
Malamut says:
Added on March 15th, 2011 at 2:48 pmHey Mark
You got it!
Now you really understand what Rod means with his words:
"With WaveMaker we can create a unique opportunity for coding and non-coding developers to collaborate on the Spring platform, providing large business value.
Traditionally the Achilles heel of such approaches is that the visual tooling produces applications that developers won’t want to hand edit—meaning that once the non-technical staff hit a wall and need further modifications to the application, specialist developers can’t help without reimplementing the application from scratch."
Mark says:
Added on March 15th, 2011 at 7:26 pmHey Malamut, I still don't see every day people doing too much with a tool like this. Even though it is point and click, it is still not just point and click.
Server variables/etc and event coding take some understanding. And still, someone needs to design the database.
That being said, I can see it being useful for less skilled developers or people who are doing simple .NET apps and you want to get them doing Java. (And I do
)
Oscar Serrano says:
Added on March 16th, 2011 at 3:35 amI agree with Mark. I wouldn't expect non-coding developers doing great apps just because the have a killer tool for UI development like waveMaker.
However, most of coding developers who are more used to databases, pojos, beans, services, daos, dtos, valueObjects, etc. spend many many time creating the view layer.
I expect that with this tool, we can seriously reduce the time spent on creating nicer user interfaces.
Malamut says:
Added on March 16th, 2011 at 5:16 am@Mark & @oscar
Don't misunderstand me, we totally agree!
For developing enterprise applications you still need experienced developers that understand coding and have learned all the stuff Oscar mentioned in his blogpost at (http://blognologos.blogspot.com/2010/11/programar-en-tiempos-revueltos.html
But the beauty of Wavemaker is that non-coders can build USEFULL webpplications. Wavemaker enables for this target group a path to the cloud.
Personally I didn't have any coding experience before I started using Wavemaker 3 years ago. After a while working with Wavemaker I started to learn javascript, firebug, mysql/postgresql, css, json, hql,java (eclipse), spring, hybernate,etc.
My advantage: I had a running and usefull webapplication at the first day I started with all the goodies insite my application without even knowing it!
So completely the other way round as mentioned in Oscar's blogpost
I still don't consider myself as an experience (java)developer but it's now much easier for me to understand what's going on "behind the scenes" in webapplications based on java and work together with "real" coding developers.
Those real developers will having a hard laugh at first when they see my "product" but instead of starting a complete new project they can import my project in their favorite java/spring development environment and start where I got stucked. Because Wavemaker delivers standaard java/spring code it's very easy for an experienced deveolper tot understand the applicationstruture/code and make my application enterprise worthy.
Niek (a.k.a Malamut)
Mark says:
Added on March 16th, 2011 at 9:41 amNiek,
I see how it was useful for you and that is how I would hope it would work and that it would be the basis for mentoring and not just end users going at it all alone. Just as long as people don't think it is a silver bullet I think that it will be fine (i.e. better than MS Access apps).
On a side note, Microsoft has there own "version" of WaveMaker. It is called LightSwitch. It is still, oddly, Beta and it seems like it will be a commercial product. I have not messed with it yet, so I don't know more than anything I read, which seems to be mostly marketing info.
oscar serrano says:
Added on March 17th, 2011 at 3:35 am@Malamut, it is really surprising that, starting with an app that it is basically used to create web interfaces, you ended using java and spring. Usually, non-coders that start that way ends with php, apache, mysql…
I hope that with this new adquisition from Spring (VMWare) more non-coders end using Spring (no matter if they use Grails, groovy, java, .net, phyton). Cause as I always tell everybody, Spring is no longer a framework. It is a new and better way of programming, a new way of thinking, that is here to stay. And the true is that I was missing in Spring someting for the V in the MVC.
I hope (no, I'm sure) that Spring will tune WaveMaker as to be as great as STS is. And, for the God's shake, make it generate JQuery code by default
Malamut says:
Added on March 18th, 2011 at 9:11 am@Mark & @Oscar
Have a look at the Wavemaker architecture at http://dev.wavemaker.com/wiki/bin/Architecture.
Wavemaker is not just a tool (Wavemaker Studio) to build a front-end but also a runtime enviroment (Wavemaker Server).
It's fully opensource (except some enterprise features)
You can download the latest Wavemaker source (6.2.5a) tar B2zip file at http://dev.wavemaker.com/wiki/bin/625GA and see by yourself all the sourcecode of Wavemaker.
So I was a non-coder that wanted to build webapps. When I hit the
"borders" of the Wavemaker IDE (Studio) I found that there are really NO limitations because everything is opensource and everything is extensible.
Also there's no better learning experience than looking at code made by others. As stated by Chris Keene, CEO of Wavemaker: "Wavemaker is build with Wavemaker". By examining the sourcecode from Wavemaker I had a complete learning path of all the necessity components to build and run webapplications .
There's still much to learn but I have the overlook that a professional developer will take years to get. I that way Wavemaker is also a good startingpoint I you got bored about the "hello world" examples.
Of course M$ has a fully integrated stack of development tools but when I tried Visual Studio / .NET I never had the idea that I was fully in control. With the components used to build Wavemaker I do!
Niek
Mark says:
Added on March 18th, 2011 at 10:01 am@Malamut – I already have it downloaded, have looked at the code and have built a small (but real world) app that reuses my existing Java services.
@Oscar – I am with you in that I hope it can draw in people who normally attracted to PHP and .NET. The Java platform and community have so much more to offer. I am continually stressed and frustrated because my current team is divided between Java and .NET.
@Spring team – looking forward to better STS integration.
Mark says:
Added on March 24th, 2011 at 9:19 amFollow-up: I have spent the last few days on WM forum. My suspicions have been confirmed. WM is really good if you can keep people in the box. But people with some DB experience and without architectural knowledge seem to have problems. People don't seem to want to stay in the box.
I think if the tutorials and document had information (best practices) to "nip things in the bud" it would help a lot. For Example: Do not show 1-to-many relationships in a Grid. Do it in the detail when the row is selected.
Anardo says:
Added on April 5th, 2011 at 9:13 pmThis tool is very awesome!
I am a professional Web Designer! I write HTML, and CSS like a G! However, when it comes to logic, and or creating a database I am lost!
God, I wanted to just use a public API, and I was like WTF!
I finally used the API with this tool! Haa! It only took me three months
but now I have this tool! SWEEET!!!
I can build some sick UI, and turn it into little useful widgets, and I can add dynamic data FINALLY lol
D Ram says:
Added on August 6th, 2011 at 12:48 amNiek,
I see how it was useful for you and that is how I would hope it would work and that it would be the basis for mentoring and not just end users going at it all alone. Just as long as people don't think it is a silver bullet I think that it will be fine (i.e. better than MS Access apps).
Dean Peterson says:
Added on September 29th, 2011 at 10:28 amI guess I'm just a javascript guy. Whenever I see a technology taking the flexibility to get down in the details of the visual representation of my widgets away I feel like I'm tying myself to one development stack. Yes, this makes developing most form based mobile apps easier. What I'm realizing is that most business apps revolve around a few basic object relationships. You simply change the names of those relationships and you have a different app. However, the interesting part, and the only reason for writing a new app is adding cool new ways to visualize that data. For example, I recently renamed the relationships of my cloudshopia site to fit the needs of metro seattle gamers. The crud part of the app could have benefitted from something like WaveMaker. However, now the real work begins and I have to represent the data as a calendar of events rather than a slick shopping tool. Dojo has absolutely nothing that fits my needs. It works for other parts of my app and I don't want to start from scratch so I quickly look around for something that will work. I find a JQuery calendar written by a dedicated individual that is perfect. I am up and running with his javascript api in minutes. How do I append external widgets to such an application? If I had used a visual builder of any kind, I am also stuck it seems. I intend to keep trying to get a handle on how I can use these frameworks to create parts of an application very quickly and still incorporate any javascript widget from wherever I want into my application. If all that widget provides is a javascript api, I need to be able to control it at that level. Is Wavebuilder still a solution?