WaveMaker

Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s Winter Survey.  We received a ton of great suggestions, comments and feedback. Extra thanks to those who provided descriptions of their applications, challenges and projects. As with many surveys, some results are expected while some are enlightening.

We were really impressed by both the large number and the wide range of interesting applications community members are building and deploying.  Mapping, tracking, dashboards, planning, monitoring, financial applications, company/group/club/band websites, mashups of all sorts and more, they are all being built with WaveMaker. The dev community is building some very cool stuff. If you should like to share a link to, screenshot of, or otherwise share more about your application with the community, drop me a line at community@wavemaker.com.

Many responders indicated that they were still learning and we heard many good suggestions on improving the learning process. The need for training was loud and clear and we will begin offering training sessions on the upcoming 5.0 release.

The screen cast tutorials are clearly liked, a lot.  So watch for more screen casts on the wiki going forward.

A good number of you indicated that you’d like to see more documentation. Let’s just say that is one outcome we might have guessed. Several of you also indicated that you’d like more opportunities to contribute to the community. This is wonderful to hear. In a yeoman’s effort, Derek has moved the documentation in the wiki. Meanwhile we’ve been opening up the wiki, enabling community users to contribute to its development.  Laurels and accolades to Sliipzinn and the others who have already signed up to help out with the wiki documentaton efforts.  If you would like to contribute to the wiki, drop us a line at, you guessed it, community@wavemaker.com.

So who won? In my mind, first prize goes to the community. Your input and contributions help advance WaveMaker studio and runtime in the directions that enable you to be successful.  Roadmap discussions on the forums, such as those by Ramzi and Matt, further help determine what the wave ahead might look like.

Who won the Wii ?  The development team helped to determine the winners. Let’s just say they were pretty engineer like in their process. I think prime numbers and differential equations were involved.

And the winners are:

Cmorinico – iPod Nano

Jandro_es – iPod Touch

Faaokcxiao1 – Wii

Congratulations to the winners, thanks to everyone who responded to the survey and extra big thanks to everyone who volunteered to contribute to the community. Keep those questions coming. Keep on posting your tips and tricks, but most of all: keep riding the Wave.

We’ve been working diligently on the next release of WaveMaker, adding a number of features that will make WaveMaker Studio easier to use and the applications build with WaveMaker faster, smaller, and more feature rich.  Here’s a quick overview of what’s coming:

Performance: We are implementing a new layout system that is significantly faster.  In some tests we’ve seen as much as 10x faster.  Since WaveMaker Studio is built using WaveMaker, these performance fixes will improve the apps that you build as well as WaveMaker Studio itself.

Deployment Size: We’ve reduced the size of the generated war file, which will also improve client performance since less code will be transferred to the client browser.  The war file will be 15-20 MB smaller.  In our testing the baseline war file size dropped from 45 MB to 28 MB.

Composite Widgets: We are adding the ability to save a page as a widget for reuse in the current project or other projects.  Within the Designer you will define the properties and events that are exposed by your new widget then publish the widget, making it available on your palette.

Templates: We are adding the ability to save a page as a template for reuse in the current project or other projects.  Similar to composite widgets you will be able to publish the template, making it available on your palette.

Automatic Form Generation: Once a database has been imported, the tables will be available on the palette in the Designer.  Drag a table object from the palette and the LiveForm is generated automatically.  Each field in the table has an editor in the form.  No need to create a LiveView, LiveVariable, or bind – these are created automatically.  You can tailor the generated LiveForm to suit the needs of your application: remove editors, move them around, or change their properties.

LiveForm with To-Many Relationships: LiveForms will now handle to-many relationships.  Drag a related table form the palette into your form and the form will be extended to show the related information.  You can select how the related information is displayed and managed through properties.

Widget Locking and Freezing: Lock the location and/or content of a widget.  This is particularly useful when designing composite widgets.

New Palette and Menu System: Overhauled and dramatically more functional palette that directs Studio functionality and integrates seamlessly with the Model tree.  Improved palette categorization and revamped and reorganized menu system.

Multiple Project Improvements: Eliminated the Welcome/Project screen.  When you start WaveMaker the last project your were editing is reopened.  A project tree allows you to quickly switch between projects and access pages from other projects.

Improved Property Inspector: Reorganized property inspector to allocate more screen space to inspectors while adding more distinct groupings so categories and options are more apparent.

We plan to release WaveMaker 5.0 in March.  We are working to make Development builds available to the community later this month.  I’ll provide an update in this blog as soon as Development builds are available.