Peter Svensson's Blog

One of the AJAXWorld breakout sessions that I had anticipated most was Chris Keene's WaveMaker presentation where WaveMaker's cloud strategy would be unveiled. Chris gave a very thorough and Monty Python themed presentation of the state of the cloud space today, with pros and cons of different solutions and with a special focus on Amazon's EC2/S3 offerings.

Attentive delegates at AJAXWorld 2008 West in San Jose, CA [Photo: Corinna Kreuger]

The reason for the Amazon focus is of course that WaveMaker is building its own service on top of it. The presentation was unfortunately not so focused on what WaveMaker's service would look like or work, but on clouds in more general terms. I do hope that they follow some of my suggestions and make the service more of a 'live' development environment than an IDE that happens to be on the web. Time will tell. Sometime in November the site will go live.

WaveMaker is superficially like Smartclient, TIBCO GI and Bungee labs connect (and MS popfly, et.c.) What separates WaveMaker from Smartclient, for example, is that Smartclient is entirely neutral towards the kind of backend being used, whereas WaveMaker projects are exportable as stand-alone WAR archives, to be dropped in any Java-based app-server of your choice. If you have a more mixed environment, Smartclient might be a better choice, but if you run a Java-only shop WaveMaker will mean much quicker deployment.

This is also what separates WaveMaker from Bungee labs (and the like), which push PaaS (Platform As A Service) where they host and manage they produced apps in pretty much the same way Google App Engine does (Except it doesn't come with any IDE). What WaveMaker brings to the table is the possibility of choice (something Chris did emphasize very well) where you can begin hosting your own application, then move it onto (say) an EC2 virtual machine, only to take it back in-house again when the corporate infrastructure or security requirements have changed. It seems that this will only be made simpler with the coming cloud service. We'll have to wait and see.