Chris Keene of WakeMaker reached out to me in response to my Freetard post. Since then, I've been reading his blog and have learned a thing or two about his thoughts on Web 2.0 and why WaveMaker is addressing the market in the way they are.
Chris writes:
"Applications are like meteorites - they never migrate, they just land and stick....
The real power of Web 2.0 lies not in modernizing legacy client/server applications, but in modernizing the skill sets of client/server developers. If an app was built in VB or MS Access and it works, leave it there. The real question is what to do with the developer who built that app?"
WaveMaker is focused on this question. Obviously a large percentage of Microsoft customers are happy being so. However, some customers are considering whether Web 2.0 style architectures can be a route towards open standards or potentially a lower risk of vendor lock-in through open source. Hundreds of AJAX toolkits are available today, but this itself is a huge problem. Next, there is still a skills requirement to get the toolkit working and construct a visual development environment like the developer has/had with VB and Visual Studio. That's where WaveMaker comes in. According to the WaveMaker website:
"WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio is an easy-to-use visual builder that enables the drag & drop assembly of scalable, web-applications using Ajax widgets, web services and databases."
Interestingly enough, WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio was built using the WaveMaker foundation (which itself is built on OSS products Hibernate, Spring and Dojo Toolkit). With over 1,000 downloads a day, WaveMaker is beginning to gain traction. Download WaveMaker and follow the tutorial and let us know what you think. WaveMaker is licensed under the AGPL and also available under a commercial license.
Posted by Savio Rodrigues on April 20, 2008 07:44 AM
