Postgres Plus Ajax = Web 2.0 Made Easy!

WaveMaker announced a partnership last week with Enterprise DB, specifically their blades program. Enterprise DB (based on Postgres) is being bundled with the next release of WaveMaker to beef up the database part of our Ajax development platform.

Now Lewis Cunningham, a Senior Solutions Architect for Enterprise DB, has posted a great WaveMaker product review. He compares WaveMaker to Oracle Forms and Oracle ApEx, with the difference that WaveMaker works with standard Java and the Oracle products only work with Oracle PL/SQL.

Lewis says:

Wavemaker Studio is much more of a GUI IDE than the ApEx application builder. ApEx looks and feels like HTML while Wavemaker looks and feel like a rich, desktop application. Wavemaker Studio just doesn't feel like you're running in a browser.

I will be posting about my progress with Wavemaker as I play with it. I am liking it now that I have it configured and working. I think one of the big things that both Postgres and EnterpriseDB have been missing is a very robust application tool. Wavemaker might just be the tool.

The cool thing about the WaveMaker/EnterpriseDB partnership is that it took exactly one phone call between myself and the Bob Zurek, the CTO of Enterprise DB, to "negotiate" the entire relationship. As I pointed out in the Silverado Rules for Open Source Success, open source is not just good for creating user communities, it rocks for creating vendors ecosystems too!

Really Simple Web 2.0

Web 2.0 apps look all shiny and bright, but we all know what horrors lurk within the typical enterprise IT shop. Web 2.0 will not be able to transform the enterprise until it can deal with real world integration nightmares like CICS systems, flat files accessed through obscure SNA protocols and AS/400s programmed in RPG.

Who is going to tame all this real world IT stuff and bring it into the bright shiny Web 2.0 world? SnapLogic and WaveMaker, that's who!

WaveMaker and SnapLogic announced today a partnership to use SnapLogic's Really Simple Integration platform to wrap any legacy data source as a web service. Once SnapLogic has "tamed the beast", WaveMaker provides a point and click, WYSIWYG development platform to expose legacy systems via rich internet applications.

Although we are performing very different tasks, both SnapLogic and WaveMaker are getting incredible value from creating web service-based products. SnapLogic wraps any data source as a web service, while WaveMaker assembles applications from any collection of web services. Chris Marino of SnapLogic also blogged about our partnership.

The following marketecture diagram shows the power of this approach. Rather than a rat's nest of one-off adapters, replicated data and custom data conversions, there is one clean API to the data - web services - and one simple tool for exposing the web services - WaveMaker!
To demonstrate the power of the rich and thin approach to web 2.0, WaveMaker and SnapLogic will be demonstrating an application at Web 2.0 Expo this week that integrates mainframe, minicomputer and relational data into a simple inventory tracking and re-ordering sytem. Stop by our booths and check it out!

Visual Ajax Webinar Thursday, April 17 at 12 PST

The next Visual Ajax User Group webinar and meeting will be next Thursday, April 17 at 12 PST. The speakers will be Scott Miles and Steve Orvell. Scott is the module owner for the Dojo Grid and Steve is a core contributor for the Dojo Grid. They will be talking about "Ajax Grids - Taming and Tooling The Widget Beast."

To attend the webinar, send an email to rsvp@visualajax.org

Our last meeting was a lively discussion led by Alex Russell on how to overcome the structural challenges of Ajax entitled, Saving Ourselves from the Unweb.

If you wish to attend in person, the meeting will be at the offices of WaveMaker Software, 301 Howard Street, 22nd Floor

Our next two meeting will feature Ajax experts from two ends of the mashup spectrum:

• May 15 - Stefan Andreasen, CTO, Kapow - Data Enabling the Ajax Mashup
• June 19 - Adam Sah, Architect, Google Gadgets - Ajax-enabled Google - Architecting Google Widgets/Gadgets and Ads

Please let us know if there is a topic or speaker you would like to see in an upcoming meeting by sending email to info@visualajax.org. For more information on the Visual Ajax User Group, click here.

Web 2.0 Rock Star Competition At MySQL Conference

If you are planning on attending the MySQL conference in Santa Clara next week, you should definitely check out the BoF session Tuesday night 4/15 @ 8:30 Ballroom E, titled "Be a Web 2.0 Rock Star"

Anand Pandey of MySQL will be conducting a hands-on training session on the open source WaveMaker visual Ajax studio.

For added excitement, there will also be a speed Web 2.0 code-a-thon with judging by Jay Pipes and cool prizes (not to mention free beer and roving Elvis impersonators)

Release your inner geek at this festive Web 2.0 code-athon!

• For newbies, get an up-close look at the latest Visual Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies.
• For rock stars, prove that you've got what it takes to be a Web 2.0 rock star!

This BoF mixes hands on tutorials for Ajax and Web 2.0 newbies with the action and excitement of a white knuckle coding competition.

Rules for the Web 2.0 Rock Star competition:

1. Start with a blank screen and your favorite Web 2.0 tools
2. Build a cool Web 2.0/MySQL app in 30 minutes or less
3. There is no rule 3

Wanna Be Elvis for an Evening? Here's How
Our panel of distinguished gearheads will award prizes in 5 categories:

1. Fastest Web 2.0 in the West - most functionality in the shortest time
2. Coolest Web 2.0 app - most likely to appear on TechCrunch
3. Funkiest Ajax widget - most strangely fascinating UI
4. Gnarliest database call - unleash the beast inside of every MySQL server!
5. Geekiest Ajax app - most Knuth-worthy implementation

Water for Non-Thirsty Horses - Open Source And Community

I am off to the Open Source Think Tank conference in Napa this week (along with Matt Asay, Marten Mickos and Gianugo Rabellino) with one burning question on my mind: how do you leverage open source "goodness" into vibrant community "greatness."

To torture a metaphor, making a product open source in an emerging market is like making water free in a land where the horses don't know they're thirsty. Going open source is not enough, the challenge is to also educate the developer market about a problem they don't know exists.

Where open source has been most successful in the enterprise has been in allowing a new entrant to gain a toehold in an existing commercial market. Open source "goodness" allowed MySQL to get traction in the crowded SQL database space and allowed JBoss to sneak past IBM and BEA in the app server space.

An open source strategy has clear value when the market is well established. In the case of WaveMaker, however, we are evangelizing a new category. Because the last ten years of web development has been code-centric, Java and C# developers don't wake up in the morning looking for visual tools to help them build their Web 2.0 applications.

A sign of how far the market has gotten away from the good old days of PowerBuilder and visual programming is that people think the Ruby on Rails is a good high productivity alternative to Java and Spring. Substituting one complex code framework for another is not exactly a dramatic step forward in democratizing web development.

Larry Augustin helped me think about this over breakfast last month. He pointed out that the traditional way to evangelize a new market is to pour lots of money into analyst relations and PR. The open source way to do this is to make a better mousetrap available to an open source community and stand back while the world beats a path to your door.

This is probably overly optimistic. Making a product open source lowers the barriers to adoption but doesn't actually drive adoption, particularly as enterprise IT remembers both the promises and shortfalls of Rapid Application Development in its previous incarnations.

Creating a community means finding a way to make developers aware of a problem they don't always know they have. Making WaveMaker available under open source is a first step, but the real work will come in creating a community around WaveMaker that evangelizes the need for more productive web tools.

Got ideas about how we can build the WaveMaker community - let me know!

The Great J2EE to .NET Migration

Rod Johnson of SpringSource spoke on my panel last week at the WebGuild conference. One topic we discussed was the need for the Java community to wake up to the reality that an increasing number of companies are moving from Java to .NET.

For ten years, the ponderous J2EE standard has made the lives of Java programmers everywhere miserable. While various Java standards committees considered gravely what to do next, corporations have been steadily moving to .NET.

In our market research for WaveMaker, we have found that a over 30% of the corporate IT market has moved from Java to .NET. As with many other Microsoft technologies (SQL Server comes to mind), Microsoft has gone from having a laughable solution to getting the last laugh.

We have also found a surprising number of Java developers who tell us that the complexity of J2EE and the difficulty of finding experienced Java developers is forcing them to embrace .NET despite their loathing of all things Microsoft.

Spring and WaveMaker are two companies addressing the core problems underlying this market shift. Spring is the application server that J2EE should have been – lightweight and powerful. WaveMaker is the visual development platform J2EE never had.

Together, Spring and WaveMaker offer a compelling and highly productive alternative to .NET.

How compelling? One of our Fortune 500 customers built the same application (57 web pages, 28 database tables) in both .NET and WaveMaker. The app built with WaveMaker was completed with one third the man-hours and 98% less code (more on this in a later post).

The conclusion is stark - either the Java and open source community needs to put good productivity solutions in the hands of corporate customers, or the data center will go the way of the desktop.

Sun Gobbles Up Open Source Star MySQL

The open source feeding frenzy continues. Last year it was Redhat acquiring JBoss. This year it's Sun acquiring MySQL. This is a strong validation for the open source business model, and gives Sun a new software platform for leadership in the enterprise.

MySQL has been strong in the web database market and is just now poking its nose into the enterprise. To do this, they have teamed up with WaveMaker for companies looking to replace their client/server tools like Oracle Forms, Lotus Notes, MS Access and PowerBuilder.

I wrote more about this in the Keeneview blog under MySQL and Marten Mickos: When Nice Guys Finish First.