Wavemaker

As 2008 gives way to 2009, it’s hard not to pause for but a moment and reflect upon the year that was. Colossal sized changes were everywhere. WaveMaker and the developer community were no exceptions. A year ago, WaveMaker Software, the company, was still getting used to its new name.  WaveMaker Visual AJAX Studio, the software, developers were still working overtime to get 3.1.1 out the door. As to the community, wow, where to begin ?  We did all sorts of things in 2008, like iPod rock stars,  going to a giants game,  starting the mastering WaveMaker webinars, attending some great meetups, launching our wiki, and of course, the 4.0 beta program which let community members directly shape the 4.0 release. The number of daily visitors has tripled, forum posts are fives times and downloads ten times what they averaged a year ago. Wow, what a difference a year can make.

This months cloud test drive was an appropriate program to close out the year. Community members like Malamut led the charge in tracking down issues in the first IDE for the cloud.  Thanks to everyone who helped test out the cloud edition. Your efforts and feedback are appreciated. Look for betas updated with your feedback in 09 !

Cloud computing is quite promising indeed, but so are the prospects for WaveMaker developers. Just this week, more new project opportunties were posted to the forums.  Speaking of opportunities for community members, it is a true pleasure to announce that Lenny has joined the dev community team. Lenny has been a regular contributor to the community since the beginning. Lenny has a broad background of open source and development technologies. He’s been a long time contributor on the forums and we’re thrilled to have him helping out. Welcome aboard Lenny !

As usual, there’s loads of interesting posts to discuss. We’ve recently discussed how the WM architecture helps thwart SQL Injection Attacks, how to customize a SalesForce mashup, and how to keep project CSS from bleeding into studio. Data grid customization is always a popular topic. Recent discussions there have included displaying an image based on grid selection and defining a custom formatter.

There is lots of neat stuff to look forward to in 2009. Keep those questions coming, keep on posting your tips and tricks, but most of all, keep riding the Wave.

EdC here. Wow. With so much exciting stuff happening here at WaveMaker and in the Developer Community, it can be difficult just to keep track of it all.

-Take the beta out for a test drive
-Think it is way cool
-Return to using the current ‘edition’ with visions of new possibilities dancing in their heads.
Is that the “Dance of the Sugarplum Widget” I hear? Tune in next week for the beta launch and all the details.

The above diagram is obviously more on the “marketechture” side rather than a strict architecture diagram, but it illustrates some interesting points:

-WaveMaker is built on a number of rock-solid open-source projects like Dojo, Spring, Hibernate, and Acegi.

-Because of the way we are built on open technologies, WaveMaker is uniquely suited to work in existing systems. We can use existing Java code, we can call any web service, and use existing databases. WaveMaker gets to stand on the shoulders of giants, and as a result our users have a really flexible platform from which to build robust apps.

-This extensibility extends to the client. We utilize a graphical binding system to tie together data and widgets, and widgets with other widgets. But if you want to do more, we don’t get in the way - you can use Javascript from any event or via any binding expression, and do whatever you want using JavaScript!

Our philosophy when building the tool was this: if we haven’t thought of it (or gotten to it yet), we might not help you do it, but we won’t get in the way, either. We’re trying to be a 4GL that doesn’t lock you in - ever.

There have been a couple of forum posts lately having to do with the payload of a typical WaveMaker application. While we are not the lightest-weight platform out there, and we have yet to optimize for mobile use, there are a few things to point out:

1. When you click “Run” in the studio, the resulting application is actually not the same as when you generate a WAR file. When you “generate WAR” from the studio, we perform a build that includes combining JavaScript files, reducing requests, and decreasing payload.
“Run” actually means “Test Run”, which we should make more clear. Test Run actually intentionally leaves all the javascript exploded, so you can easily debug, and so that the application appears faster without the overhead of a build. So Test Run can have a payload of a couple hundred requests and nearly 1MB, while the actual WAR file we generate has a far more modest number of requests and payload size that is in- line with other Ajax applications. So if you are benchmarking us, please do so on the actual deployed WAR, not running from studio.

2. Currently, we do not optimize payload based on what widgets you use. So a 1-widget app downloads the entire widget set. Again, this is more apparent in Test Run - our javascript build makes things somewhat better in deployed applications.

3. That said, we are almost done with a performance-themed release. We should make some further gains in both payload as well as rendering speed. Stay tuned for more details as the release nears.

We’re finding great traction in our Community with our Ajax Master Tutorial series.  Here’s the next couple of installments (click on the name to find out more):

Filtering and Displaying Data With WaveMaker

Data selection and presentation are critical aspects of a successful data driven application. This session will focus on using the data filtering and sorting options available to developers in WaveMaker studio. Particular attention will be made to the options provided by liveVariables.
Presenter: Ed Callahan, Director of Technical Services, WaveMaker
30 October 2008, 11am PT

Upcoming:

Using LDAP Security With WaveMaker

LDAP is often used by organizations as a central repository for user authentication and role information. In this tutorial we will show how to set up security against LDAP in WaveMaker.
Presenter: Frankie Fu, Senior Software Engineer, WaveMaker
18 November 2008, 11am PT

In WaveMaker 4.0, we introduced a system for building data-driven applications quickly with little to no code. We called it LiveData, which is utterly un-trademark-able, much to marketing’s chagrin. It involves a few pieces that when used together make life easier:

1. LiveTables - this is the only piece of this system that predates 4.0, but it had a different name. This is the name for the schema for your database that exists in WM. When you connect to a database and import a schema, or build one from scratch in the data model editor, we create a set of POJOs to represent your data and the relationships between them. LiveTables map directly 1-1 to your database tables.

2. LiveViews - New in 4.0, LiveViews are collections of LiveTables and their related items. If you want to do CRUD (database operations) on more than one, related LiveTable, go to LiveViews to create this set of related objects.

3. LiveVariable - This is a variable that stores an instance of your LiveView or LiveTable on the page. To use LiveData, you need to create one of these and set its dataSource property to the LiveView or LiveTable you want to perform operations on

4. LiveForm - This form, when bound to a LiveVariable, constructs editors for each form element, and handles new, delete, insert, and edit functionality. You can even bind this form to a grid’s selectedItem to do list-detail style forms.

When you use these items together, you can create data-driven applications with no code. If you want to do something custom, LiveForm and LiveVariable have lots of events you can call custom code in as well.

In the near future we’ll be extending LiveData to web services as well as any POJO in the system, regardless of source.

Here in the last days of September, we’re taking a moment to look back at this month’s news & events highlights and take a sneak peek at October’s.

From our success with KANA to announcing company-wide growth to hosting the monthly Visual Ajax User Group meetings to our best Ajax Master Tutorial yet, WaveMaker has been busy this month.  But we’re not done…coming up tomorrow: a WaveMaker/Xignite joint webinar!

In October, highlights include presenting at the Cloud Summit, the KANA Customer Summit, AjaxWorld, an EnterpriseDB/WaveMaker joint webinar and a number of online events.

To learn more about these or any other WaveMaker news or event, you can always glance at our news & events page, sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of the news & events page, or copy our RSS feed link into your RSS reader of choice so you always get the latest updates immediately.

Join Steve Orvell (TurboAjax co-founder) for this webinar next Tuesday:

Data Grid Master Tutorial with WaveMaker

23 September 2008, 11am PT
Steve Orvell, Senior Architect, WaveMaker

A grid is a fantastic way to view complex data at a glance. Whether it’s data from a database, web service, or java service, WaveMaker provides a simple way to produce complex grids quickly. We’ll review how to setup a basic grid and then dive into some advanced ways to manipulate the grid widget in WaveMaker.