The Keene View on Cloud Computing

The Web is the New App Store

2011-10-04T09:35:00.000-07:00

I attended the GigaOm Mobilize conference (where VMware was well represented by CTO Steve Herrod) and came away with a few observations that are relevant for our overall mobile strategy:

The web is the new app store. I had dinner with the heads of mobile for two large retail chains. Although each of them have multiple App Store apps, the vast majority of their mobile business is coming through the safari browser and not the app store. Consumer behavior is to go to the web to buy things, even on mobile.
There are only two mobile markets, native iPhone and mobile web.The shift to HTML5 (+Phone gap if necessary) is happening rapidly. Almost every speaker talked of the html5/jquery/phonegap stack with a few native iPhone holdouts (e.g., gaming, iPhone only apps like Hipmonk). Phone gap allows html5 apps to access native smartphone features and be packaged for native app stores, effectively erasing the lines between html5 and native. There was zero discussion of native development for Android or any other non-iPhone platform.

Here are some intriguing, but less well formed conference themes:

Notifications are the "home page" for mobile apps. Mobile apps force developers to rethink and simplify enterprise apps - making them more modular and "attention-driven"
iPad is rapidly changing expectations about how web apps work. SalesForce's Do.com is using the iPad as their primary web platform and porting from there to browsers and smartphones.

Darwin's Cloud

2011-09-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

RedHat conducted a survey of over 1,200 VMworld attendees on their cloud plans. Here is the question that I found most interesting:

What primary development framework are you planning to use in the cloud?

Java EE 32%
.NET 29%
PHP 14%
Python 6%
Spring 6%
Ruby/Rails 5%

If you take this at face value, the ideal PaaS for the enterprise would support Java EE, .NET and PHP. So far, this is well beyond the capabilities of the existing PaaS vendors.

In particular, there is no PaaS vendor bridging the Java/.NET divide. This raises a natural question: what is the fastest way to evolve cloud platforms?

There are two approaches to filling in these PaaS framework holes:

Do it yourself: Heroku just added Java support to their cloud. Because PaaS offerings from Amazon and Heroku are proprietary, they are pretty much stuck with the go it alone approach.
Create an ecosystem: Cloud Foundry just added PhP and Python support through partners. A huge advantage for open source clouds is that they can leverage the work of their communities to move farther and faster than closed-source competitors.

Open source clouds should be able to sustain a faster rate of revolution, provided that they can continue to build vibrant communities that contribute back to the core project.

Cloud Foundry is the LAMP Stack of Cloud Computing

2011-08-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

Just as the LAMP stack provided a core foundation next gen for web applications, Cloud Foundry is providing a core foundation for next gen cloud platforms.

Cloud Foundry announced today that two new startups are building their clouds based on Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry is proving itself to be truly the foundry for creating entirely new cloud offerings:

ActiveState is building a cloud for Python and Django and contributing code to support Python back to the Cloud Foundry open source project.
Appfog is building a cloud for PHP developers and contributing code to support PHP back to the Cloud Foundry open source project

The beauty of this is that innovative startups are able to start with a scalable cloud "stack" that gives them a multi-language PaaS without locking them into a particular cloud provider.

So for example, Appfog gets to use Cloud Foundry's best in class PaaS services and then target deployment to Amazon's EC2 and services like S3. Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson blogged here about how standing on the shoulders of cloud computing giants will allow Appfog to win in the cloud by providing the most compelling user experience.

Expect to see the pace of innovation accelerate dramatically going forward!

DevOps and PaaS - Friend or Foe?

2011-08-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

DevOps, which I will arbitrarily define here as "automating SysAdmin tasks to streamline application lifecycle management," raises important questions about the cloud.

Developers may ask: "if I have a self-service portal for deploying applications (aka PaaS), do I need SysAdmins at all?"
SysAdmins may ask: "isn't PaaS just a monstrous black box that prevents me from provisioning the specific services we need to deploy real-world apps?"
VMware asks: "what if you could get a PaaS that wasn't black box, enabling developers to deploy apps easily while still giving SysAdmins the ability to provision any services they needed (aka Cloud Foundry)?

I had a good conversation recently with John Willis of DTO Solutions (twitter feed here) in which he waxed eloquent on how DevOps and Cloud Foundry can live together in harmony. Here were the key points I took away:

SysAdmins distrust the black box nature of PaaS: Typical sysadmin thinks that they can get to 75% of PaaS functionality with DevOps tools like Chef without giving up any systems architecture flexibility. In contrast, PaaS solutions like Heroku provide developers an easy to use PaaS but gives SysAdmins zero ability to add services that Heroku doesn't support.
Cloud Foundry solves the SysAdmin aversion to cloud vapor: CloudFoundry runs anywhere, incuding on your laptop. Cloud Foundry's service container concept is particularly strong, kind of an appliance on steroids.

There is a strong natural between DevOps and PaaS. Products like Chef and Puppet are strongest for installing and configuring the OS and middleware stack. PaaS solutions like Cloud Foundry excel it deploying application architectures.

The holy grail is to use Chef or Puppet provisioning Cloud Foundry services that can then be easily consumed by developers. DTO Solutions is putting on events to show SysAdmins how to make this happen.

You can also register for the a DevOps HackDay featuring CloudFoundry. The first one is being put on at VMware, September 8, 2011.

PaaS is a Cloaking layer for clouds

2011-07-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

We seem to be coming to the end of the definition of Platform as a Service (PaaS) blog posts and are now moving on to the more pressing question of what is PaaS good for?

In a recent Paul Maritz talk at GigaOm Structure conference, he referred to PaaS as "a cloaking layer for clouds." This is an elegant definition for a rapidly expanding market of add-on cloud services.

If Cloud 1.0 is a set of servers in the sky (think Amazon EC2), then Cloud 2.0 is a layer of services that hide the complexity of developing, deploying and managing applications in the cloud (think CloudFoundry).

The API for Cloud 1.0 is the virtual machine/OS. The API for Cloud 2.0 is the application container itself - services like CloudFoundry, Elastic Beanstalk from Amazon and Heroku allow a developer to hand over an application to the application container without having to know anything about what operating system that application is running on or how it communicates with other services like load balancing, failover and database.

Here are several examples of PaaS cloaking to simplify cloud development:

Dev/test environment: WaveMaker pioneered the market for cloud-based development of standard Java applications. In addition, simply virtualizing the provisioning of servers has huge value for development and testing purposes. Today, this is a major driver for developer adoption of cloud in general and PaaS in particular. I have talked to CIOs who claim that over 30% of their resources for new projects goes into provisiong and managing the dev/test environment.
Scalable application deployment: Amazon EC2 has made its mark by providing a highly scalable data center in the sky. Zynga uses Amazon as a safety net when it has no idea how popular one of its games will be. Once Zynga has a handle on demand, they move the game over to their own data center. Just a year ago, getting this kind of scaling required detailed understanding of cloud architecture and a whole lotta scripting. Now it's as easy as "vmc push --instances 8"!
Resilient application deployment: infinite scaling is great, but what happens when a network configuration error brings down in your infinitely scalable data center? In that case, having a PaaS service that automatically mirrors applications across multiple data centers makes a critical difference.

In a sense, PaaS is just a new kind of virtualization, one that operates at the level of an application container instead of an operating system. No wonder then that VMware has a lot of firepower to bring to the PaaS market.

Where is the Killer App for PaaS?

2011-06-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

Over the last month, I have had lengthy discussions about developer adoption of Platform as a Service with two of my favorite cloud computing analysts - John Rymer of Forrester and Michael Cote of RedMonk.

The net of these conversations that we are still early in the adoption curve for PaaS. In particular, developers are not yet demanding PaaS the way operations people are demanding Virtualization.

Here is my summary of these discussion:

Developers are wary of PaaS: developers are not overly keen on PaaS at the moment. They are not yet mentally prepared to give up the middleware layer of their applications. Lacking a compelling reason to use PaaS, developers are sticking with tried and try development stacks.
PaaS for existing apps has limited benefit: For existing applications, there's not much to gain by simply moving from non-cloud modes to cloud modes. This is the foundation of Cote's Cloud Rule - "if it ain't broke, don't cloud it".
PaaS fits best for new apps: with new applications, the benefits of PaaS (cost and agility) all seem to line up.

This means that cloud vendors need to "connect the dots" for developers and business managers to accelerate their adoption of cloud platforms. In particular, there are two

PaaS lowers the bar for web development: PaaS solutions like Cloud Foundry and WaveMaker make the cloud's benefits available to everyone, not just the A-Team. Of course, this requires significant education to let business developers know that easier web dev tools exist.
PaaS speeds the delivery of apps for all developers: Michael Cote recently argued that speed is the killer app for cloud. Again, this requires market education to get the word out that quantifies these benefits.

The World Is Your Oyster: Installing and Using Cloud Foundry on Windows

2011-04-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

CloudFoundry is an incredibly cool way to build and deploy cloud apps to any target cloud using very simple commands.

The basic api has just three commands:

vmc target cloud.url //select cloud provider
vmc login // login to cloud
vmc push app.name // run cloud app

Three commands and the (cloud) world is your oyster! Very cool.

This may be just me but I found it difficult to follow the install guide for Cloud Foundry on my windows machine. For those of us trapped behind corporate firewalls and proxy servers, things got even more complicated.

After scurrying around the cloud foundry forums and stackoverflow, here are my slightly revised notes for getting Cloud Foundry running on a Windows machine using a proxy server:

1. Apply for a Cloud Foundry account at www.cloudfoundry.com you will be notified by email when your account is activated

2. Install Ruby from www.rubyinstaller.org. The Cloud Foundry cloud controller command line is built in Ruby so this is required. As the installer runs, make sure to check the boxes to add the ruby directory to your command path

3. Start the Windows command line client on windows by typing "run cmd" in start menu

4. Install the Cloud Controller software. Type:

gem install vmc

If you are behind a firewall, you will get a nasty error message:

ERROR: Could not find a valid gem 'vmc' (>=0) in any repository

5. Install vmc gem through a proxy server, type:

gem install --http-proxy http://proxy.vmware.com:3128 vmc

Congratulations! The Cloud Foundry Cloud Controller is now installed. From here on, you can type Cloud Foundry commands into the Windows command window.

6. Tell Cloud Foundry which cloud you want to connect to. Type:

vmc target api.cloudfoundry.com

Again, if you are benhind a firewall, you will get the error message

Host is not valid: 'http://api.cloudfoundry.com

7. To communicate with Cloud Foundry through a proxy server, set the environment variable "http_proxy". In the command window, type

set http_proxy=http://proxy.vmware.com:3128

vmc target api.cloudfoundry.com

8. Login to Cloud Foundry

vmc login

Enter your email address and password

9. Create a simple Ruby application.

cd \

mkdir hello

cd hello

The above commands create a "C:\hello" directory. Using a text editor type the following and save the file as "hello.rb"

require 'sinatra'

get '/' do

"Hello from Cloud Foundry +VMware and may I add you look dashing today?"

end

11. Publish the application to the cloud. Type:

vmc push

The following prompts will appear :

Would you like to deploy from the current directory? [Yn]

Assuming that you are in the hello directory hit enter (this answers Yes)

Application Name: hello_username

NOTE: use a unique name for your application best to concat your user name and "hello"

Application Deployed URL: ‘hello_username.cloudfoundry.com’?

Press enter to accept default

Detected a Sinatra Application, is this correct? [Yn]

Press enter to accept default

Memory Reservation [Default:128M] (64M, 128M, 256M, 512M, 1G or 2G)

Press enter to accept default (128MB)

Creating Application: OK...

Would you like to bind any services to ‘hello’ [yN]:

Press enter, you don’t want to bind any services for this example

12. Launch a web browser and go to your Application Deployment URL.

Now wasn't that easy?

Troubleshooting Problems With CloudFoundry

In deploying or updating an application, you may get the following error:

Uploading Application:
Checking for available resources: OK
Processing resources: OK
Packing application: OK
Uploading (2M): OK
Error (JSON 500):

The workaround for this is to make sure that the application is stopped (vmc stop foo) before you update the application (vmc update foo).

Death by Cloud - How Amazon is Killing Open Source Software

2011-04-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

The mood at last week's Open Source Think Tank was surprisingly somber. Two years ago, the open source community was celebrating huge acquisitions such as Sun's purchase of MySQL (and even the VMware acquisition of WaveMaker). This year, the consensus was that the economic model which led to success for companies like MySQL and RedHat is being fundamentally disrupted by cloud computing.

For example, Amazon recently launched a successful Relational Database Service (RDS). This hugely profitable service is based on MySQL, but Amazon doesn't pay MySQL a penny for it. This spells death for the traditional open source business model.

To understand why, let's look at how the open source model used to work. The open source business model has traditionally been based on two revenue streams: 1) revenue from OEMs who embed an open source product into their commercial offering and 2) revenue from providing support services for production systems that embed an open source product.

Whenever a company embedded MySQL into their commercial offering, they had to either license their own product under an open source license like GPL or buy a commercial license from MySQL. Just as importantly, a company using MySQL in a production environment would purchase support from MySQL as an insurance policy.

Now let's look at Amazon RDS. First of all, Amazon gets around the GPL license because they are not delivering binaries to their customers. This means that Amazon can deliver a commercial service without being forced to open source their own software. Next, Amazon has sufficient internal expertise on MySQL that they can provide their own support.

The open source community has tried to fight back. For example, the new Affero GPL license (AGPL) was supposed to fix the loophole which allows Amazon to deliver MySQL as a commercial service. However, since almost nobody is using the AGPL license, every OSS project faces the prospect of seeing someone else deliver commercial services based on their product for which they don't get paid.

New open source companies are trying to get ahead of this trend by offering their own cloud-based service - such as Cloudera (Hadoop). This is a good idea, but it is not clear how these stand alone services will be able to compete with Amazon's Elastic Mapreduce service, also based on Hadoop.

Of course, none of this is going to stop the success of the open source movement in general. There are many projects which have no commercial aspirations. However, until open source companies can articulate a business model that can thrive in the cloud, this does cap the potential valuations of open source companies and hence their access to venture capital.

Cote's rule: If it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it

2011-04-05T10:45:00.000-07:00

I took the title of this post from a recent blog entry by Michael Cote. Cloud enthusiasts (often people with limited operations experience) talk in grandiose terms of moving the entire data center to a public cloud. Cloud naysayers (often people with extensive operations experience) talk in detail about all the things you can't get in the cloud, like latency, lack of multi-cast, weaker security etc.

In general, cloud computing fits modern web architectures very well, by which I mean any app built to support a web browser client. These applications are "cloud-ready" and require little effort to move to a public or private cloud.

In general, any application not build to support a web browser client is going to be problematic to move into the cloud. These applications often rely on technologies that are not readily available in the cloud, such as multi-cast.

The decision to cloud or not to cloud is not a binary decision made at the data center level. Instead, it is a more nuanced decision made at the app level.

Similarly, the decision to go public cloud or private cloud is a decision made at the app level.

At the margin, be governed by Cote's Rule of Cloud Migration: If it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it!

WaveMaker Springs To VMware

2011-03-08T09:15:00.000-08:00

We are announcing today that WaveMaker has been acquired by VMware. This partnership is the result of discussions that have been going on between WaveMaker and the SpringSource division of VMware for more than a year.

I have always had great respect for how Rod Johnson revitalized and simplified the Java market with the Spring framework and developer projects. When we started development of WaveMaker over three years ago, we chose Spring as our foundation.

WaveMaker is based on the Spring framework but targets a different audience: non-expert developers looking for the easiest way to build web apps.

It turns out that this is a very large market. According to Gartner, only 20% of IT staff have expert app development skills - WaveMaker is the tool to enable the other 80% of IT to build web apps quickly and deploy them to the cloud with a single mouse click.

As WaveMaker went from 3,000 downloads a month in January, 2010 to 135,000 downloads a month in December, 2010, we realized that we had created the perfect "on ramp" for cloud computing. WaveMaker can play a big role in bringing large numbers of developers to the cloud, but only if we team with the right cloud partner.

With VMware and SpringSource, we have found that partner!

The good news here is that VMware will continue to support and provide services to the WaveMaker customers, via the same team that provided it before.

For Rod’s perspective on the acquisition check out his blog post here.

PaaS Takes Center Stage

2010-11-30T11:04:00.000-08:00

Over the last week, Platform as a Service has moved out of the shadows to become big news in the cloud world. Here is a quick roundup of recent events:

RedHat acquires Makara: this is a great move by RedHat, who has been hitherto a peripheral player in the great cloud game. Makara gives RedHat a platform that makes it much easier for developers to deploy cloud applications while also providing rich debugging capabilities. The Makara founding team came from Wily and brings deep understanding of application lifecycle management for cloud applications.
Cloudbees gets funding for a Java PaaS: this breathes life into the Java PaaS market, bringing the same kinds of turnkey cloud management to the Java community that Engine Yard and Heroku bring to the Ruby on Rails Market. Cloudbees was founded by the former CTO of JBoss and has tied their Java PaaS to the Hudson

The first phase of cloud computing was focused on the hardware side of things and Infrastructure as a Service. In order for cloud computing to gain widespread adoption, a software management layer is required to simplify the process for deploying and managing applications in the cloud.

Powerful Web 2.0 Alternative to PowerBuilder

2010-07-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

Rich Bianco over at the Displaced Guy blog just wrote a post entitled WaveMaker delivers for the cloud like PowerBuilder did for client-server. In it, he talks about using WaveMaker to migrate PowerBuilder applications to Java.

He makes a number of great point in his post. Here are the key take-aways

1. PowerBuilder is a powerful product but developers need a rich internet alternative.

"I’ve spent most of my career doing PowerBuilder development against every major DBMS and I still believe it offers productivity beyond anything on the market for client-server applications. But the writing is on the wall for client-server and rich internet applications and WaveMaker are the future."

2. WaveMaker is particularly easy to learn for PowerBuilder developers because it uses the same visual development and data window-like concepts

"WaveMaker is the first development tool since PowerBuilder to catch my attention and keep it. WaveMakers’ claim of building a functional enterprise web application without needing to write Java code is for real. In a single day, I’ve taken an existing PHP / MySQL web 1.0 application and re-created a good portion of the core functionality using WaveMaker."

3. WaveMaker is just plain fun, particularly for PowerBuilder developers!

"From the day I downloaded WaveMaker and gave it a test run I knew that it was the next step for me as a former PowerBuilder developer. Not and not only am I still having a blast but I feel as confident as ever to tackle the challenge of developing enterprise web applications, or robust SaaS solutions."

It has taken WaveMaker almost 3 years to build a worthy replacement for PowerBuilder. We certainly have not achieved the full breadth of functionality that developers can get from mature client/server tools like PowerBuilder, MS Access and Oracle Forms. However, for developers who want a fast and easy way to build Web 2.0 applications, WaveMaker rocks!

Migrating from Microsoft to Open Cloud Tools - Mind the Gap

2010-07-14T16:32:00.000-07:00

A recent survey of WaveMaker's 15,000 developers found that over 20% had moved to WaveMaker as an alternative to Microsoft development tools like MS Access and MS .NET.

"Microsoft shops" typically employ a variety of Microsoft products and have dozens to hundreds of applications that now need to be migrated.

Having worked with many companies going through this migration process, here are some best practices I have seen:
1. Triage, triage, triage - figure out which apps are really critical to your business/users and focus on them. Often, as you migrate them from Microsoft to WaveMaker you will find that you can combine several clunky client/server apps into a single rich internet application.
2. WaveMaker makes open a lot easier - WaveMaker hides most of the alphabet soup web technologies from the user (html/css/javascript/java etc). This flattens the learning curve to get out from under all those MS technologies. From our survey, we found that fear of the steep web development learning curve is one of the main reasons companies stick with the proprietary Microsoft tools.
3. WaveMaker is a lot more productive - we find that MS .NET apps can typically be rebuilt in WaveMaker with 80%+ fewer lines of code. See the Nationwide video on the WaveMaker web site for a case example that resulted in 98% fewer lines of code! That translates to big savings in productivity and quality, both in development and maintenance.
4. Open is still a bit messier - even though WaveMaker hides most of the hard stuff, it can't hide all of it. Microsoft's great advantage is that everything is tightly integrated into one convenient but proprietary package. In contrast, WaveMaker integrates with many databases, report writers, etc, which is more flexible but puts more work on the developer to manage their environment.

In short, WaveMaker provides a much gentler path for migrating from the Microsoft Borg to the wonderful world of open standards, but there is still a cost for all that flexibility.

Citrix & WaveMaker - A Little Leverage Goes a Long Way

2010-07-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

Citrix and WaveMaker's partnership to deliver a complete cloud developmentplatform is gaining attention.

This week, John Abbott of the 451 Group wrote a piece on how the Citrix Cloud Center strategy is coming together, thanks to a little help from WaveMaker (registration required).

The Citrix/WaveMaker development and test solution gives Cloud Hosting Providers a way to build a cloud ecosystem that will help them attract and retain customers. As John says:

"Telcos and service providers want the elbow room to differentiate their services from competitors by adding their own intellectual property."

With WaveMaker's cloud development platform, Cloud Hosting Providers make it easy for developers to build applications that deploy seamlessly to their cloud and can take advantage of their unique services for security, scalability and manageability.

Finally, the 451 Group points out that WaveMaker gives Citrix an easy-to-use PaaS solution that can leverage the Citrix cloud stack, much as SpringSource can leverage the VMWare stack. All in all, WaveMaker is shaping up as a game changer for cloud solution providers!

WaveMaker in the Warehouse

2010-06-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

Althought the iPad is getting all the press these days, WaveMaker customers are building pretty compelling apps with plain old ruggedized PCs.

This week we announced an application built using WaveMaker that meets the demanding requirements of warehouse loading docks for grocery stores and retail chains.

The Costa Solutions warehouse loading dock application runs on handheld tablet PCs from Motion Computing. Because internet connectivity is not reliable on warehouse loading docks, where, the WaveMaker app is architected to run in both connected and offline modes.

When the tablet is offline, data and pictures are collected and stored on the tablet PC. When internet connectivity is re-established, WaveMaker automatically synchronizes the changes back to the logistics data center.

The application includes digital signature capture, digital camera integration, counterfeiting protection and automatic application update.

Free Alternative To Microsoft Access - WaveMaker

2010-05-28T16:01:00.000-07:00

Getting somewhat adventurous, I started a new blog and created a post on Free Alternatives to Microsoft Access.

We see it as our patriotic duty ;-) to make the world safe from proprietary client/server platforms.

Enterprises are increasingly moving from proprietary platforms like Microsoft Access to open Java platforms. Yet training Microsoft Access developers to use complex Java tools can be time consuming and costly.

WaveMaker provides a unique solution for migrating Microsoft Access developers and applications to open Java standards. WaveMaker's visual development tools are easy for Microsoft Access developers to use, while generating standard Java code that runs in any Java server.

WaveMaker's visual, drag and drop studio is ideal for developers who want to focus on creating enterprise applications, not coding. In particular, WaveMaker flattens the learning curve for moving from proprietary platforms like Microsoft Access to open Java.

WaveMaker 6.1 - Cloud Development On A Roll!

2010-05-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

WaveMaker is on a roll - having hit profitability at the end of last year, we are now targeting 300% growth for 2010. This week, we announced the latest release of WaveMaker.

With our 6.1 released, WaveMaker truly delivers on our "PowerBuilder for the Cloud" vision. We are the only company offering visual, browser-based development of cloud applications that comply with enterprise Java standards.

By eliminating the complexity of building and deploying cloud applications, WaveMaker 6.1 enables these Citizen Developers to take advantage of cloud computing. Cool new features include:

One-click deployment to Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Eucalyptus and OpSource.
Automated multi-tenancy and secure, tenant ID-based data isolation
Dynamic widget loading for up to 500% faster performance.
Rich text editor, Twitter feed and other widgets.
Improved SVN integration for team development

In keeping with Gartner's prediction that cloud computing will create a major shift in how "Citizen Developers" build applications, we are seeing the bulk of our growth come from companies migrating from proprietary platforms to open Java. WaveMaker is an ideal open Java alternative for Oracle Apex, Microsoft Access, Microsoft .NET, PowerBuilder, Lotus Notes and Coldfusion.

Get started with WaveMaker today by going to www.wavemaker.com/download!

CIOs Beware: Citizen Developers are on the Loose

2010-03-26T17:26:00.000-07:00

Gartner this week released a report entitled "Citizen Developers are Poised to Grow." The report by Gartner Analyst Eric Knipp describes how forces like more computer literate employees, cloud computing and better tools are fundamentally changing the role of IT.

Eric paints a vision that in one stroke could eliminate the feared IT backlog: "Citizen developers leverage shared services and 4GL-style development platforms, releasing IT resources to do what they do best, if IT leaders allow it."

Gartner argues that CIOs should enable business analysts to build "self-service" applications that can be managed centrally by IT. This puts IT in the role of providing a secure infrastructure while enabling business developers to implement business processes using 4GL-like tools.

According to Eric, "CIOs who attempt to block citizen developers are fighting a losing battle."

Of course, arming citizen developers will require new tools. In particular, the Gartner report calls out "the latest crop of 4GL products such as Oracle APEX, WaveMaker and Zoho Creator provide a compelling AD environment for citizen developers."

While much of the focus on cloud computing has been on the heavy duty, mission-critical applications, it is likely that the truly disruptive impact of cloud computing will be on enabling non-expert developers like business analysts to prototype, create and maintain applications with minimal direct IT involvement.

It takes a community

2010-02-12T16:33:00.000-08:00

Open source companies live or die by the health of their communities. WaveMaker's proudest achievement last year was creating a passionate and rapidly growing community.

Thinking back, probably our most important decision affecting community health was made early in the year, when we decided to dump our AGPL license in favor of Apache.

Although we had never gotten direct feedback that the community didn't like AGPL, we had more forum posts than we thought was healthy that asked pointed questions about our licensing. This let us know that people were confused, and if there was any doubt in our minds, the licensing debacle at Ext js convinced us that Keep-It-Simple-Stupid is the only way to go here.

Once community developers felt confident that they could do what they wanted to do with our Community edition without somehow triggering a commercial fee down the road, the community literally exploded. Together, here is what we accomplished in 2009:

Stunning community growth: 18 months after our product launch, the number of registered developers for WaveMaker (15,00) is about one third the size of the Spring community (49,000)!
Profitability: WaveMaker closed 2009 as a profitable company and saw revenue growth of 53% in our last 3 months!
Gartner recognition: WaveMaker was featured in 9 different Gartner reports last year, including one which identified WaveMaker as the only open source platform for cloud development!

Why the tidal wave of support for WaveMaker? That's easy - WaveMaker makes it ridiculously easy to build great-looking, standards-based Java applications.

Web 2.0 enabler: at companies like Macy's, National City Bank and Pioneer Energy, WaveMaker enables non-Java developers to create Java apps with minimal training.
Productivity multipier: at ISVs and systems integrators, WaveMaker reduces development costs for Java and Web 2.0 applications by over 75%.

WaveMaker Finds Pot of Gold On Top of Cloud

2010-01-07T19:27:00.001-08:00

WaveMaker started 2009 staring into the abyss and ended the year on top of the clouds - funny how things work out in the startup world. During the year, WaveMaker doubled annual revenues and achieved profitability while also increasing quarterly sales by over 53%.

The biggest momentum driver came from the success of our Cloud Quick Start Partnership with IBM, Amazon and RightScale. We also started seeing significant sell-through from SaaS ISVs and systems integration partners.

WaveMaker's position as the only open source cloud development platform makes it a "must have" cloud ecosystem partner. WaveMaker is ideal for ISVs who want to SaaS-enable their offerings and enterprises who want an easy way to take advantage of cloud computing's compelling economics.

Analysts groups are jumping on board as well - Gartner alone produced 9 reports featuring WaveMaker in 2009! Here are some of my favorite quotes from the year:

"Our walk into the cloud with WaveMaker turned out to be a very short journey - and a pleasant one!" - Mark Angel, CTO KANA
"Consider WaveMaker Cloud Edition if you want a 4GL-style development tool that uses standard technologies and open-source frameworks, and you wish to create new SaaS-style offerings." - Eric Knipp, Research Analyst, Gartner Group
"I predict that WaveMaker will be an important cloud company to watch in 2010!" - Judith Hurwitz, President Hurwitz & Associates
"2010 just might be the year to crown WaveMaker the PowerBuilder for the web" - Brian Gentile, CEO JasperSoft

2009 was a tough slog - we are determined to make 2010 a victory lap!

Where To Hide a Dead Horse and Other Uses For the Cloud

2009-12-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

With full credit to the Geek and Poke blog, the funniest nerd cartoon I have seen all year!

Cloud Computing - It's The Destination, Not The Journey

2009-12-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

I have had some interesting conversations recently with partners about how cloud computing will affect the developer tools market.

I don't believe developers jump on a band wagon just because they like the wagon. They jump on the wagon because they like where the wagon is going!

Roughly every 10 years, a technology disruption changes developer aspirations and drives them to adopt new tools that get them to new places.

With client/server, developers aspired to build "modern" apps and break free of the bureaucracy of central IT. Cloud computing offers a similar, updated, value - deploy web applications without the hassle of central IT.

Developer aspirations are changing - this is the underlying market driver for WaveMaker.

At the same time, IT vendors are seeing their value disrupted. As the data center morphs into a set of APIs, decisions which used to be made by sys admins and DBAs are made by the developer (Cloud Foundry is a good example of this).

The developer platform is becoming the control panel for the data center - this is the WaveMaker's value to partners. This is also the basis for our cloud quick start program with IBM, Amazon and RightScale.

One company that has realized the competitive opportunity in cloud computing is Microsoft. By integrating Visual Studio with Azure, they have created a powerful engine from which to attack the entire data center infrastructure.

If business developers really do "take to the clouds", the challenge I see for IT infrastructure providers is how to harness changing developer aspirations to ensure that the cloud deployment stack includes their solutions.

A Few Things To Be Thankful For

2009-11-25T15:50:00.000-08:00

Before I head off for my favorite holiday, I wanted to send out an update on Wavemaker.

Our big news of course centers around the release of Wavemaker 6. This release was over a year in the making and represents the first open source cloud development platform on the market (hook up wavemaker with eucalyptus and you have your own open source answer to Force.com and Azure!).

On the business side, WaveMaker continues to drive strong revenue growth in a down economy, putting us in reach our objective to achieve profitability by the end of the year!

Just to brag a bit, here are some analyst quotes from our WaveMaker 6 press release:

"WaveMaker's open source cloud development platform provides an important approach for customers adopting cloud computing," said Judith Hurwitz, author of Cloud Computing for Dummies and President of Hurwitz & Associates. "WaveMaker's ability to create partnerships with IBM, Amazon and RightScale also illustrates the value of an open source business model."
"WaveMaker is easing the migration path for Java developers who want to bring existing application logic and data into a SaaS environment, while still retaining control over their deployment options," said Phil Wainewright, industry analyst at Procullux Ventures. "With automated support for robust multi-tenant databases, WaveMaker 6.0 advances software developers even further along the path towards realizing the full benefits of the SaaS model."
"Cloud computing is fast maturing, but one lagging indicator is developer tools designed specifically for cloud deployment," said James Governor, principal analyst at RedMonk. "WaveMaker aims to change that with their 6.0 release, an open source toolset, and relationships with key players such as IBM, Amazon and RightScale."

WaveMaker 6.0 SaaS-enables Web Apps in Minutes

2009-11-18T09:43:00.000-08:00

Until today, web developers creating SaaS apps have been faced with an ugly choice: use proprietary development platforms like Force.com or build an open solution from scratch.

WaveMaker today released the first open cloud development platform. WaveMaker 6.0 is a visual development platform that runs in a browser.

WaveMaker makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to prototype, develop and customize great looking web applications.

How easy you ask? Well, how 'bout:

With all this open and cloudy goodness, it is not surprising that the momentum behind WaveMaker continues to build.

What kind of momentum? Well, how 'bout:

WaveMaker's open source community now numbers more than 15,000 active developers
The Cloud Quick Start Partnership teams WaveMaker with IBM, Amazon and RightScale
Citrix makes WaveMaker available as an integrated development platform for NetScaler

Let the fireworks begin!

Vendors Will Have To Climb Higher To Reach Clouds

2009-11-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

Hard on the heels of the VMWare/SpringSource acquisition, VMWare entered into a grand alliance with Cisco and EMC (although technically, VMWare announcing an alliance with EMC is like Buick announcing an alliance with GM).

Once the data center is fully virtualized, resilient and automated, it becomes the proverbial black box. As long as it is secure and performant, where it is located or what the hardware layer looks like is unimportant.

Any company whose value proposition is centered around feeds and speeds is going to have to scramble higher up the stack. If your target customer is hardcore data center guys, you are going to find fewer and fewer of those folks to talk to.

As customer IT shifts from hardware to solutions, vendors will have to climb higher up the value chain to keep engaged with their customers. With its Unified Computing System, network vendors like Cisco are becoming data center solution vendors. With Spring, virtualization vendors like VMWare are becoming development solution vendors.

At the top of the cloud stack is Platform as a Service (PaaS), which manages both how applications are developed and how they can be customized by end users. At WaveMaker, we see PaaS as the primary lever for delivering value from the cloud.

As IT vendors climb higher to deliver more complete solutions to their customers, PaaS will emerge as the heart of the cloud ecosystem.

Ecosystem is the Killer App for Cloud Computing

2009-10-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

We know all about these loose ecosystems of Barney-loving, hand-holding, kumbaya-singing companies who promise a full solution to help you take advantage of the next overwhelming wave of technology...for a fee.

In the past, vendor ecosystem announcements indicate a vague intention on the part of the vendors to do something together someday - providing they can all find a customer to pay for it.

With the cloud, however, ecosystems are different. They are easier to create, both from a business and technical point of view. They are also much more transparent, as the results of their efforts are available for the whole world to see.

WaveMaker, RightScale, IBM and Amazon just announced their own cloud ecosystem. This ecosystem is being marketed as a cloud quick start program, which aims to make cloud computing ridiculously easy and give companies a one-stop solution for migrating existing Java applications to SaaS and cloud computing.

Not only are all of the cloud quick start products fully integrated and running today in the Amazon cloud, but the integration is available for anyone to use who has an Amazon account. Even better, the first company to complete the 2 day cloud quick start program, KANA, was so impressed with the results that they plan on going live with their first cloud deployment before the end of the year.

What makes the cloud unique is not the individual bits of software running in some dark data center, but that for the first time it is easy to stand up a number of complex pieces of software, knit them all together and make the resulting integrated solution available to anyone who wants to use them.

Take for example the elements of the cloud quickstart program, which integrates products from four enterprise software companies. Just imagine trying to pull off this kind of integration without the cloud.

First of all, you would have to get software licenses from each vendor, then find a place to install them all and then figure out how to integrate them. These tasks alone would take weeks to months.

Now compare that with the same scenario in the cloud. WaveMaker, RightScale and Amazon already have software running on Amazon EC2 and available for anyone to use. Once the companies have done the basic integration work, it is easy to produce custom AMIs that provide a pre-integrated solution to the rest of the world.

The cloud quickstart program for cloud application development from WaveMaker, RightScale, IBM and Amazon is not the only example of this kind of ecosystem. An equally impressive ecosystem for cloud business intelligence launched a little over a month ago featuring RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica.

Cloud hosting providers like Amazon provide a sort of global workbench on which software vendors can integrate quickly and without even having explicit business relationships. This may in the end prove to be the real killer app for cloud computing - the ability to adopt entire software ecosystems with the click of a button.

What Separates A Cloud From (water) Vapor?

2009-10-01T16:19:00.000-07:00

I spoke this morning with the cloud evangelist for a hardware manufacturer. Not surprisingly, they come at cloud from the iron up, so for them cloud is mostly about virtualization with a little more buzz.

While I can understand this viewpoint, if today's cloud is just yesterday's server consolidation in new clothes, then Larry Ellison's latest "a cloud is just water vapor" rant is probably appropriate.

So what exactly is the dividing line between virtualization and true cloud goodness? I think the key lies in bringing together a fuller solution with a cloud platform than with a virtualization platform.

Cloud computing gets interesting when the platform includes not just deployment (infrastructure as a service or IaaS) but also development (platform as a service or PaaS). Linking these two capabilities opens up fundamentally new markets as well as compelling economics.

Virtualization is about abstracting application deployment so that one box can run many apps, with each app pretending that it is lord and master of it's virtual computer. The value of virtualization is to reduce the amount of hardware needed to run a set of apps and correspondingly reducing the amount of systems administration time needed to manage the overall data center.

Cloud computing is about abstracting application development and deployment so that anyone can develop and manage applications without needing specialized expertise. The value of cloud computing is to reduce all IT costs while increasing organizational flexibility. More people can build the apps they need and fewer expert developers, DBAs and systems administrators are needed.

At its core, virtualization improves IT efficiency - doing traditional computing with fewer resources. On the other hand, cloud computing improves IT effectiveness - empowering more people to build applications with more flexibility and fewer experts. For example, this is the core value prop behind IBM's Cloud Quickstart Program, which includes IBM, Amazon EC2, WaveMaker and RightScale.

Our view at WaveMaker is that the big private cloud payoff comes only when you make both development and deployment of web apps radically easier (cloud-ready computing). If you will, virtualization and private cloud management (IaaS) both reduce the administration costs - the cost transformation comes when you slash not just administration but also development and maintenance costs (IaaS + PaaS).

A Radical Transformation - Running Chrome Inside of Internet Explorer

2009-09-23T10:42:00.000-07:00

Internet Explorer, particularly versions 6 and before, are the bane of any web developer's existence. The Internet Explorer versions Microsoft produced during the competion-free era between when Netscape died and Firefox came on the scene are masterpieces of monopolistic neglect. IE 5 and IE6 are slow, proprietary and just plain awful to work with.

Worst of all, Microsoft guaranteed themselves longtime domination of the corporate browser market through this cynical behavior because all the web apps built for IE 5 and 6 are so full of hacks that they won't run on "modern" browsers!

Nothing strikes fear into the heart of our professional services team quite like the words: "yeah, we're thinking about rolling out IE 7 sometime in the next 18 months."

But now there is a way out of the nightmare that is IE. Alex Russell at Google (of Dojo Toolkit fame) has figured out a way to run Chrome as a plug-in inside of IE - even the old versions. This means that web developers can build applications the way nature intended and IE is none the wiser.

For cloud computing in general and Platform as a Service in particular, this is great news. With Platform as a Service (PaaS), you develop and deploy apps from within your browser, so the power of the browser directly governs the power of the your development platform.

For WaveMaker and other PaaS vendors, this extends the reach of our cloud computing solutions to the back hinterlands of corporate America where technological change comes most slowly and where consequently frustration with IT is highest.

Making Cloud Computing Ridiculously Easy

2009-09-17T15:34:00.001-07:00

With all the hullabaloo about cloud computing, it is easy to get caught up in the trend of the day and miss the big picture. The big picture is that cloud computing disrupts the data center world by slashing the capital and skills required to deploy a web application.

If that is the big prize, then most of what passes for news in cloud computing is more along the lines of "me speak cloud too."

Today, cloud development and deployment is still the exclusive domain of highly paid web experts and just as highly paid hosting providers and systems administrators. As much as cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace have done to simplify web hosting and eliminate people from the equation, it still takes far too much expertise and effort to get applications built and deployed in the cloud.

The goal of cloud computing is to make web development and deployment something that any bum can do and charge in on their credit card with nary a care in the world.

With all due humility, I think RightScale and WaveMaker have taken a big step towards that goal this week, introducing an easy-to-use cloud development platform with one-click deployment to Amazon EC2 via RightScale.

It is now monkeys-on-keyboards easy to create a web application and deploy it in a secure, scalable cloud environment using WaveMaker/RightScale and Amazon.

So who cares about this stuff anyway? How 'bout IBM and Amazon!

On Thursday, October 1, IBM and Amazon are hosting a half-day webinar entitled Cloud computing for developers: Hosted by IBM and Amazon Web Services . At that webinar, WaveMaker and RightScale will provide an online demonstration of building a web application with WaveMaker and deploying it to a WebSphere AMI using RightScale. One small click for man, one giant cloud for mankind!

Cloud Ready Computing

2009-08-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

Cloud computing offers significant economies in deploying and managing applications. While enterprises are not yet ready to move mission-critical applications to cloud computing, CIOs and CTOs are increasingly wanting to create applications that are "cloud-ready."

A cloud-ready application is based on an architecture which provides the flexibility to deploy the application to either a traditional data center or into a private or public cloud infrastructure. This flexibility ensures that enterprises can take advantage of cloud computing benefits whenever they choose.

Being cloud-ready requires much more than simple virtualization. As the $420M acquisition of SpringSource by VMWare demonstrates, making applications cloud ready requires adopting new development platforms that are purpose-built for supporting on-site and on-demand computing.

Some cloud-ready development platforms (also called Platform as a Service or PaaS) are highly proprietary. These frameworks require a complete rewrite of the application for cloud computing and lock the developer into a single hosting provider such as SalesForce or Google's AppEngine.

Other cloud-ready development frameworks are open, enabling developers to leverage existing application logic and data. Open Platform as a Service, or OPaas, allows CIOs and CTOs to have the best of both worlds, creating applications which can run in the data center or in the public cloud with no changes to the underlying application. Examples include WaveMaker and Corent.

Cloud Ready Case Study - IBM's Cloud Quickstart Architecture

IBM has created a Cloud Quickstart Architecture that embodies what they see as best practices for developing cloud-ready applications. This architecture includes WaveMaker, WebSphere, DB2, Amazon and RightScale. To see a podcast on this architecture, click here (registration required).

WaveMaker is an Open Platform as a Service for developing cloud-ready web applications. WaveMaker includes client and server frameworks that greatly reduce the time to cloud-enable an existing application or create a new, cloud-ready application.

The WaveMaker self-service client framework provides configurable, drag and drop client components that simplify the delivery of self-service web applications. The WaveMaker multi-tenant server framework provides secure, multi-tenant server modules that automate the creation of scalable cloud applications.

The WaveMaker frameworks are backed by a 10,000-strong developer community and complement existing application servers (e.g., Tomcat, WebSphere) and development tools (e.g., Eclipse, Netbeans). WaveMaker customers like KANA, National City Bank and Macy's have cut the cost and time to build cloud-ready applications by over 75% using WaveMaker.

In the IBM Cloud Quickstart Architecture, ISVs can leverage existing Java code written in WebSphere as well as data stored in DB2. WaveMaker provides the cloud-ready frameworks for the client and server. RightScale provides elastic scaling as well as fault tolerance and fault recovery. Together, these companies provide an example of end-to-end cloud computing that leverages existing application resources.

Why VMWare Bought SpringSource

2009-08-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

VMWare announced a $420M acquisition of SpringSource today. Given that SpringSource revenues are estimated to be around $20M, this acquisition was a spectacular validation that cloud computing is rearranging the development landscape.

SpringSource developed the Spring open source Java application platform. Over the last year, SpringSource also acquired the Tomcat web server and Hyperic management tools, giving them a complete platform to build, run and manage Java applications.

SpringSource shares WaveMaker's vision that the future of cloud computing belongs to open platform as a service products. Many cloud solutions today are completely proprietary, locking developers into a single vendor.

In contrast, SpringSource and WaveMaker both promote an Open Platform as a Service vision. By providing an open platform for both cloud and data center hosted applications, SpringSource and WaveMaker give developers flexibility to build and deploy applications wherever they want.

With this acquisition, VMWare will be able to optimizes the services it provides based on a better understanding of how the applications themselves are built. With cloud computing, the age of generic virtualization is coming to an end. Hosting providers who can optimize their services based on application-specific requirements will have an advantage over "application-blind" hosting providers.

As cloud computing disrupts the way applications are deployed, it is also disrupting the way applications are developed. At WaveMaker, we believe the next big step is for the development tool themselves to move into the cloud, making it possible to build and deploy applications completely from a browser.

More resources
Matt Assay's analysis of the VMWare acquisition on CNET

Rod Johnson's blog post on the VMWare acquisition of SpringSource

Survey: IBM ISV Plans for SaaS Development

2009-07-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

recently held a joint webinar with IBM to describe a methodology for ISVs to migrate to SaaS and cloud computing cost-effectively (you can see the recorded webinar here). The key is being able to leverage existing data and logic while moving iteratively to deliver web, SaaS and Cloud capabilities that provide the biggest value to the customer at the least cost and risk to the software developer.

During the webinar, we conducted a survey of the ISV attendees that turned up some interesting results about where ISVs are along the SaaS migration path and where they would like to be in 12 months.

We defined a SaaS maturity model with 5 levels:

Level 0: web-enabled. The ISV's application can be accessed through a web browser without requiring the end user to install anything on their desktop.
Level 1: hosted. The ISV's application can be hosted without requiring the customer to install anything in their data center.
Level 2: self-service. The end user can customize an application (e.g., configure dashboards, reports, data, workflow) without having to do any coding.
Level 3: multi-tenant. The ISV can support multiple customers with a single application, database and security instance.
Level 4: cloud scalable. The ISV can deploy their appplication within a cloud infrasctructure that automatically scales up and down based on load.

The interesting thing about this maturity model is that levels 0 - 2 are about delivering higher value to the ISVs customers, while levels 3 and 4 are about reducing costs to the ISV to scale their operations. The important take away for the ISV is that the value of levels 3 and 4 are highly sensitive to the ISVs projections about the number of customers they need to support along with the level of customization that each customer requires.

Based on this maturity model, attendees first told us where they are today. The following pie chart shows how ISVs rank the maturity of their existing products. Note that over half of the ISVs put themselves at the most basic level - web-enabled application.

Next, we asked ISVs where they would like to be in 12 months. The following pie chart shows where ISVs would like to see their product offerings in 12 months. Note that the bulk of ISVs intend to deliver self-service customization, but fewer ISVs plan on moving all the way to a multi-tenant, cloud-scalable solution over the next 12 months.

Admittedly, this survey data is more anecdotal than rigorous (there were only 35 respondents). However, it is an interesting indication that ISVs are looking for an incremental methodology for migrating their applications to SaaS, rather than a big bang approach in which the ISV does a complete rewrite of their software.

Resources:

Click here for more about IBM's SaaS enablement program
Click here for more about the SaaS maturity model

Another SaaS Migration Success For WaveMaker

2009-07-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

In addition to growing sales by a whopping 80% last quarter (worthy of another blog post on its own no doubt), WaveMaker also brought on a number of impressive new customers.

Yesterday we announced that the ECN Group subsidiary of New Zealand Post has adopted WaveMaker as their platform for delivery the next generation of their Round Trip Logistics application. ECN has over 3,000 customers and sells their SaaS logistics application throughout New Zealand, Australia and Asian markets.

WaveMaker makes SaaS simple both for SaaS vendors and their customers:

SaaS migration: like many ISVs, ECN already has a good deal of application business logic written in Java. WaveMaker allows ECN to create a new SaaS application that leverages the work they have already done.
SaaS development: just like we did with KANA 10, WaveMaker's drag and drop development platform can cut the time to develop a new SaaS application by at least 50%
SaaS end-user customization: WaveMaker's unique strength is in enabling SaaS vendors to deliver applications that can be easily customized by end users. In KANA's case, this meant enabling business managers to react to changing business conditions by customizing workflows in minutes that would otherwise take months of expert IT resources.

WaveMaker's SaaS development platform shows ISVs how to build a SaaS application using an incremental approach that delivers the highest bang for the buck. Other solutions like Force.com require that ISVs completely redevelop their application - a more costly and risky approah.

KANA 10 - New Poster Child For Web 2.0 Self-Service

2009-07-01T12:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, KANA announced the release of KANA 10, whose killer feature is the ability for call center executives to do self-service customization of call center workflow to meet changing business requirements.

KANA is using a customized version of WaveMaker studio that allows call center execs to configure the business workflow using a drag and drop interface.

KANA 10 shrinks a process that used to take months down to minutes - all thanks to WaveMaker!

According to KANA's CTO, Mark Angel, "WaveMaker's visual Ajax studio turbocharged our web development effort for KANA 10, cutting at least 50 percent of our UI development time compared to a standard Ajax library."

The following screenshot shows an agent dashboard built using WaveMaker and based on the Dojo Toolkit. Pretty snazzy huh?

The following screen is intended for end user self service and gives proof positive that Web 2.0 has entered the enterprise!

KANA 10 was built using WaveMaker and the IBM SOA Foundation and was developed in conjunction with IBM customers. KANA did a complete rewrite of their entire suite of applications in less than a year (we announced the WaveMaker/KANA deal 10 months ago)- a terrific validation for Web 2.0, the Dojo Toolkit, Ajax and SOA technologies.

Big Hairy Severed Jugulars - and other secrets of marketing new software products

2009-06-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

While our engineering team works feverishly on the Beta 2 release of WaveMaker for the cloud (with intermittent breaks for foosball), I am wrestling with how to explain what our product does and why anyone should care.

Let's face it - small, innovative tech companies are a dime a dozen. When we ask potential customers to literally bet their careers on our latest shiny gizmo, there had better be a pretty compelling reward to offset that risk.

With that in mind, I am creating a marketing pitch to overcome customer's innate skepticism by answering three basic questions:

What is the severed jugular customer pain point? The first step is to identify a customer problem that you can solve and that customers really care about. Solving an annoying problem works for established vendors (kind of), but absolutely will not get a new vendor in the door. The marketing pitch has to solve a top 3 problem where the customer believes "if I don't get this resolved my job is on the line."
What is a unique selling proposition? Connected directly to the pain point, you have to define exactly what unique benefit the customer can only get from your product. The important point here is that there is a single unique value that you will put first and foremost in front of the customer.
What is our company's big hairy audacious goal? Even if a customer has a huge pain point and sees the value of your unique selling proposition, they will only buy if they think you will be around long enough to solve their problem. In this case, "solve their problem" means that the customer gets so much glory for choosing your product that they get promoted (at which point it's the next guy's problem ;-). Creating a big vision for your tiny company is a powerful way to give your customer confidence that your product is around for the long haul.

This of course sounds more formulaic than it actually is, but at a minimum provides some good questions to ask when evaluating a marketing pitch. Stay tuned for WaveMaker for the cloud's answers to these questions!

Twitter is AIM for adults

2009-06-04T16:36:00.000-07:00

At the monthly NVMDA* last night, the topic turned (as all tech topics do these days) to Twitter.

What those of us with teenagers reported is that Twitter is a complete non-phenomenon for the otherwise technologically-obsessed younger generation.

Our conclusion was that Twitter is most exciting for people who don't use instant messaging. To be sure, Twitter != AIM and vice versa, but Twitter provokes a fascination with instant communication among older geeks that younger geeks like my son experience every day via text messaging.

Not that this necessarily spells any sort of dire outcome for Twitter, just that it is unlikely to replace SMS as the communication vehicle of choice for the next generation of computer jocks.

* Noe Valley Men's Drinking Association, a poorly, but aptly named group of thirsty gentlemen.

Oops, my inner nerd is showing

2009-05-22T09:30:00.000-07:00

With the release of WaveMaker 5.0, I rolled up my sleeves, got out my pocket slide rule for moral support, and dove into tech-topia.

The result was two very geeky articles:

Automating Hibernate Mappings and Queries with WaveMaker published in TheServerSide this week. Describes how WaveMaker can automate the process of building Java applications that have relational back ends and web clients.
Fixing Ajax Back Buttons and Bookmarks with Dojo published in DojoCampus. Addresses the issues around getting the browser back button to work with Ajax web clients, as well as how to implement standard url bookmarks with Ajax.

Both articles were well received - even the notoriously testy ServerSide crowd was well behaved.

The down side, of course, is that programming plays to my built in compulsive/addictive personality, so I find myself waking at 2am with my brain working on some minute programming problem in full throttle.

The Missing Link - Data Access for RIAs

2009-05-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

ZapThink just produced a good report on the state of Web 2.0 tools entitled "Evolution of the Rich Internet Applcation Market."

In the report, Jason Bloomberg and Ron Schmelzer of Zapthink highlight a critical gap in most RIA solutions: the inability to access data from within the UI. They then point to this as a major source of competitive advantage for Adobe:

"Adobe stands alone as the only vendor who offers a commercial, RIA-specific data access product."

It is probably not completely fair to expect Zapthink to include in last week's report a product that was released last week, this is exactly the problem that WaveMaker 5 solves with Enterprise-ready Data Widgets. In fact, the similarities between Adobe and WaveMaker's solutions is startling:

Comparison of RIA Data Frameworks

The Zapthink report concludes by saying that the most attractive market opportunity is not for stand-alone RIA libraries but for full RIA development enviroments like Adobe LiveCycle, Microsoft Silverlight and WaveMaker.

Five Free Mashup Tools You Should Know About

2009-05-08T11:15:00.000-07:00

Mashups is a pretty broad term. A good definition for a mashup tool is a solution that allows developers to combine interesting data and then visualize that data through a web application

Usually, mashups are web applications that can be created quickly using standard web services (e.g., REST) and components (e.g., Widgets).

There are three kinds of Mashup tools: front end, back end and integrated. The differences are:

Front end mashup tools: these tools help build web front ends like dashboards using widgets/gadgets and little to no programming (iGoogle, PageFlakes)
Back end mashup tools: these tools combine web-accessible data and services into more useful web services that can be called easily using a REST-ful interface (Kapow, Yahoo pipes)
Integrated mashup tools: these tools make it easy to build end-to-end web applications that link web widgets to data and services.

When evaluating mashup tools, you need to think about what kind of mashing you are trying to do:

Do you want to create a visual dashboard from existing widgets? Try a front-end mashup tool. These tools make it easy to create a personal dashboard that tracks your stocks, local weather, the time in 51 timezones and the current price of titanium.
Are you wanting to turn web-accessible stuff (like ebay auctions or linkedin contacts) into a web service API? Try a back-end mashup tool to get at data programmatically that you otherwise have to do by hand (and mouse).
Do you need to create an end-to-end web app like a dashboard or simple business portal? Try an integrated mashup tool to build applications quickly and with minimal programming. Integrated mashup tools are effectively the modern version of MS Access for the web.

Another factor to consider is whether you have to download and install anything to use it. Mashup tools can be purely web-based (like Yahoo pipes or PageFlakes), purely download (Open Kapow) or available both as a download or hosted (like WaveMaker and IBM Mashup Center, both of which are hosted on Amazon EC/2).

Here are five free, open source mashup solutions you might want to check out:

iGoogle - Front End Mashup Screen Builder Tool

If you are looking for lots and lots of widgets, look no further. iGoogle has tens of thousands of gadgets (many of the most popular ones NSFW, but that's how it goes). Try iGoogle here.

Open Kapow - Back End Mashup Service Builder

The web is a wonderful place to find information, if you are a human and have a lot of time. Getting programmatic access to data on the web is a completely different story (wouldn't it be nice to see which of your favorite restaurants has a table open at 6 tonight automatically?) Kapow is a web-based tool for creating "robots" that gather data on the web and return the results as a web service. Try open Kapow here.

Yahoo Pipes - Back End Mashup Service Builder

Pipes is a web-based tool that allows developers to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. It is not as full-featured as Kapow, but you can try it without having to download anything. Try Yahoo pipes here.

IBM Mashup Center - Integrated Mashup Builder

Mashup Center was written with the non-developer in mind. That design objective increases the number of people who can use the tool, but limits the complexity of what you can build. In general, Mashup center requires that developers create a set of enterprise widgets (using IBM's iWidget spec) . There is also a cloud version of Mashup Center, but it requires that you have your own Amazon account set up. Try Mashup Center here.

WaveMaker Studio- Integrated Mashup Builder

WaveMaker provides a fast and easy way to build web applications. It targets Java developers who want a RAD GUI builder as well as novice web developers who want to build web applications with minimal learning curve. You can try the cloud version of WaveMaker here, or try the WaveMaker download here.

WaveMaker 5 Cuts Java Web Development Time 90%

2009-05-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

Today, we launched version 5 of our visual development platform for Java and web developers.

Java developers need the equivalent of MS Access for building Java Web Applications. Currently, a Java developer wanting to build a web application faces a huge learning curve, to say nothing of the coding burden.

WaveMaker 5 addresses the need for easy to use tools for building Java Web Applications. Wavemaker 5 introduces Enterprise-ready Data Widgets. WaveMaker generates these custom components automatically when a developer connects to a database.

With Enterprise-ready Data Widgets, WaveMaker reads the database schema and creates a widget for each table that the developer can drag and drop into an application. Enterprise-ready Data Widgets can display table data as an Ajax grid or as a form with automatic data validation and built in create, update and delete capabilities.

WaveMaker makes it possible for a developer to create a database-driven web application with literally three clicks:

Click 1: connect to the database. WaveMaker studio automatically imports the schema and creates an Enterprise-ready Data Widget for each database table.
Click 2: drag Enterprise-ready Data Widget from the studio palette to the application canvas
Click 3: press Run to perform a test run of the application in a local Tomcat server. The final application can deploy to any Java server.

Try it today! You can download WaveMaker and try it yourself here.

WaveMaker Weathers The Storm

2009-04-22T17:39:00.000-07:00

In my various swims around the San Francisco bay, there have been times - thankfully only a few - when the combination of waves and tide seemed too powerful to overcome. Luckily, I have yet to get swept out under the Golden Gate bridge.

In a similar way, there have been economic times - again only a few - when the combination of customer caution and investor panic seemed overwhelming. Through Q4 and Q1, our strategy was to hunker down, dig deep and do our best.

As it turned out, doing our best and not losing focus was enough to help WaveMaker grow revenue through the last six months. More importantly, we are closing in on our goal of profitability for the second half of the year.

In my experience, startup companies always seem incredibly fragile, but are actually pretty resilient. Of course, it helps to be solving a pressing problem in a growing part of the market ;-)!

I am particularly excited about our upcoming WaveMaker 5 release this month. This release sets a new gold standard for ease of use: you can build and deploy a complete, database-driven web application in just 3 mouse clicks!

Here are some of the continuing signs that WaveMaker has the current in its favor:

Huge ROI Proof: Judith Hurwitz wrote a report as part of IBM's SaaS Enablement practice, showing how using WaveMaker can lower SaaS TCO by 75%
IBM Partnership: WaveMaker is providing integration tools for IBM's LotusLive, for example adding SalesForce and LinkedIn contacts to the LotusLive dashboard.
Agile Services Launch: WaveMaker now has its own crack services team. Need a web solution built quickly and cost-effectively? Call us!

Here's hoping that the worst of the economic storm is behind us and that smoother waters lie ahead.

Opening Up Platform as a Service - What is Open PaaS?

2009-04-08T10:18:00.000-07:00

Platform as a Service (PaaS) offers a way to build and deploy applications entirely in the cloud. This market was pioneered by SalesForce and their Force.com PaaS offering.

PaaS offers the potential to democratize web development by enabling anyone who can use a browser to assemble and extend web-based applications. Yet early PaaS players, including Force.com, Bungee Labs, Google AppEngine and Microsoft's Azure, have introduced PaaS solutions that are remarkably proprietary.

A proprietary PaaS solution introduces high switching costs to move data or logic from one PaaS provider to another. For example, moving an application from the recently deceased Coghead to AppEngine would require a wholesale rewrite of an application written on one proprietary framework to another.

In short, customers adopting PaaS gain access to powerful new technical capabilities but at the cost of stepping back to the proprietary business models of 20 years ago. Surely the same market forces that have driven greater transparency in the enterprise software world will also prevail in the brave new world of cloud computing!

In talking with customers and analysts, WaveMaker has introduced the term Open PaaS to describe what the next generation of cloud development tools should look like. In our definition, Open PaaS solutions have four characteristics:

Portable - customers must be able to run applications built using PaaS tools on multiple cloud offerings. PaaS offerings based on proprietary languages (e.g., SalesForce, Bungee, Coghead) lock customers into a single cloud provider.
Based on open standards - customers must be able to leverage existing skills such as Java and Javascript to build applications using a PaaS tool. Offerings that are based on proprietary software stacks (e.g., Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure) lock customers into a single cloud infrastructure.
Available as open source - customers must be able to run applications created with PaaS in their own data center in an open source environment . SugarCRM pioneered the attractive concept of letting the customer "take their ball and go home." For PaaS vendors, it is even more important that customers be able to move a cloud app from the cloud to behind their firewall.
Mobile-aware - increasingly, web enablement reaches beyond the desktop browser to smartphones from companies like Apple, RIM and Palm. Customers need PaaS tools that can deliver device-appropriate content and functionality. Effectively, this is an update of the old Java "write once run anywhere" mantra.

As the cloud evolves, it is inevitable that customers will demand more flexibility. With that in mind, WaveMaker recently became a supporter of the Open Cloud Manifesto, a very timely effort spearheaded by Reuven Cohen, CTO of Enomaly.

You can read the Open Cloud Manifesto here, but here is my take on the 6 principles of the Open Cloud Manifesto (the bold titles and italic comments are mine):

Commit to cloud interoperability: Cloud providers should collaborate to solve standard problems (e.g., security, interoperability) in a standard way. At a minimum, this requires publishing the APIs needed to build interoperable security and other services across cloud providers.
Eschew vendor lockin: Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms. This goes to the heart of the problem. If you are at the head of the pack, why slow down and let others catch you? The answer can only be because doing so gives you access to a much bigger market, of which you are still at the head of the pack but with a smaller lead!
Adopt existing standards aggressively: Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever appropriate. This will be much easier for new cloud vendors, who are starting from scratch, than existing cloud vendors, who built out their infrastructure before many of these standards existed.
Minimize proliferation of new standards: When new standards are needed, Cloud vendors must be judicious to avoid creating too many standards. We must ensure that standards promote innovation and do not inhibit it. This shows great wisdom in the ways of the world. What are most standards bodies anyway but the effect to gain or preserve market share by non-market driven means?
Focus new standards on actual customer needs: Any community effort around the open cloud should be driven by customer needs. This is another swipe at the self-serving approaches of many standards bodies. From a cynical perspective, we will know cloud computing is successful when its standards bodies become just as opaque and non-customer focused as other entrenched standards like Java ;-)
Cooperate between standards groups: Cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap. This is well-intentioned, but also seems to be saying "thou shalt have no cloud advocacy groups before me" (shouldn't that be commandment I?)

Just like that large collection of tubes called the Internet, this notion of Open Cloud and Open Platforms is here to stay!

What Is Platform as a Service (PaaS)?

2009-03-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

There are a number of companies offering Platform as a Service (PaaS), but little agreement about what PaaS is or how to compare various PaaS offerings from companies ranging from SalesForce to WaveMaker. Even the Wikipedia entry on PaaS starts with a stern warning that the entry is full of buzzwords and lacking in concrete examples.

Definition of PaaS

PaaS solutions are development platforms for which the development tool itself is hosted in the cloud and accessed through a browser. With PaaS, developers can build web applications without installing any tools on their computer and then deploy those applications without any specialized systems administration skills.

McKinsey & Company, in their 2008 report "Emerging Platform Wars," defined Platform as a service as "cloud based IDEs that not only incorporate traditional programming languages but include tools for mashup-based development."

What Makes PaaS Different?

The alternative to PaaS is to develop web applications using desktop development tools like Eclipse or Microsoft Access, then manually deploy those applications to a cloud hosting provider such as Amazon EC2.

PaaS platforms also have functional differences from traditional development platforms. These include:

Multi-tenant development tool: traditional development tools are single user - a cloud-based studio must support multiple users, each with multiple active projects.
Multi-tenant deployment architecture: scalability is often not a concern of the initial development effort and is left instead for the sys admins to deal with when the project deploys. In PaaS, scalability of the application and data tiers must be built-in (e.g., load balancing, failover need to be basic elements of the dev platform itself).
Integrated management: traditional development solution usually do not concern themselves with runtime monitoring , but in PaaS, the monitoring ability needs to be baked into the development platform.
Integrated billing: PaaS offerings require mechanisms for billing based on usage that are unique to the SaaS world.

Faux PaaS - 4 Ways To Tell If It's Really PaaS

At a minimum, a PaaS solution should include the following elements:

Browser-based development studio - if you have to install something on your computer to develop applications, that's not PaaS!
Seamless deployment to hosted runtime environment - ideally, a developer should be able to deploy a PaaS application with one click. If you have to talk to a person to get your app deployed, that's not PaaS!
Management and monitoring tools - while cloud-based solutions are very cost effective, they can be tricky to manage and scale without good tools. If you have to bolt on DIY monitoring to scale your cloud app, that's not PaaS!
Pay as you go billing - avoiding upfront costs has made PaaS popular. If you can't pay with your credit card based on usage, that's not PaaS!

Benefits of PaaS

The benefits of PaaS lie in greatly increasing the number of people who can develop, maintain and deploy web applications. In short, PaaS offers to democratize development of web applications much the same way that Microsoft Access democratized development of client/server applica

Today, building web applications requires expert developer with three, highly specialized skill sets:

Back end server development (e.g., Java/J2EE)
Front end client development (e.g., Javascript/Dojo)
Web site administration.

PaaS offers the potential for general developers to build web applications without needing specialized expertise. This allows an entire generation of MS Access, Lotus Notes and PowerBuilder developers to start building web applications without the huge learning curve.

PaaS Resources

Examples of PaaS solutions today include:

AppEngine from Google: based on Python and Django
Force.com from SalesForce: based on the SalesForce SaaS infrastructure and Apex language
Bungee Connect: visual development studio based on Java
LongJump: based on Java/Eclipse
WaveMaker: visual development studio based on Java and hosted on Amazon EC2

Other definitions for Paas are offered by Bungee, Salesforce and ZDNet.

How to create an unbelievable amount of buzz

2009-03-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

We were briefing a senior architect at one of our partners last week when he commented, "you know, for a company of your size, you generate an unbelievable amount of buzz." In the same week, we were flattered to have a competitor draft a lengthy blog post that listed all the reasons they were better than WaveMaker.

From the inside, it always feels like things are moving too slowly, but from the outside, clearly WaveMaker is, well, creating liquid oscillations.

Later on today, I am presenting to a group of Haas MBAs on the topics of innovation and entrepreneurship. So with my professorial hat on (and continuing my series on open source marketing metrics), here is my best guess at a stepwise approach to building buzz:

Go open source to get into the game. It is amazing to me how many SaaS and cloud companies are still playing the old, proprietary enterprise software game. I believe that open source is the only viable technology channel today - without this, building buzz is almost impossible. Coghead was the latest victim of the proprietary software strategy, despite launching the first, easy-to-use cloud development platform. iPhone is a good counter-example, but Apple is a special case of a company that has always gotten away with murder because of their fanatic base of developers.
Feed your community to build a fan base. Without an open source product, I would argue that it is almost impossible to create a self-sufficient community. Communities don't grow by themselves, though. It takes dedicated resources to nurture a community into a real advocate for your product.
Blog your vision. Blogs provide a platform for entering into a dialogue (or at least a protracted monologue) about where the market is going. It creates a way to engage with the community and draw new people to the community. For the last 6 months, the Keeneview blog has always been the number 2 or 3 source of new downloads for WaveMaker.
Twitter your tactics. Twitter provides an instant gratification approach to discussing the latest tactical nuances of your strategy. My Twitter account is where I make short, cryptic pronouncements for the benefit of all my ADHD friends.
Carpet bomb your successes. Whenever anything good happens, I make sure the world knows about it. This includes not just spamming my own social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, dZone, delicious, stumbleupon) but also reaching out to all the other bloggers out there who are always looking for validation points around their own vision. For example, each time I make a blog post, I send emails to a dozen or so bloggers who I think will be most interested in it, thereby getting a multiplier effect.
Brief analysts to confirm your victories. Analysts like Judith Hurwitz, Michael Cote at Redmonk, Mark Driver at Gartner and John Rymer at Forrester are critical for getting the word out, but I see their role as fast followers, not leaders of market momentum. Once you have enough proof points among bleeding edge adopters, the analysts can connect the dots for more mainstream adoption, not to mention perform major messaging tune-ups!

I'm not guaranteeing these techniques will work for everyone, but they should help get you on your way to "unbelievable" buzz!

How To Lose The Codies

2009-03-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

The open source world has been very, very good to WaveMaker. We have a thriving online community, and through our community we have attracted customers like Cisco and Macy's, along with partners like IBM and KANA.

The open source world thrives on transparency and trust - a potent combination.

Yet every so often we get tempted to go back to the bad old proprietary world where decisions are made based on opacity and who you know.

With jaw-dropping naivete, I paid $1,100 to an organization called the Software Information Industry Association (www.siia.com) in order to participate in their Codies awards contest.

I was snowed by the idea that the SIIA's crack panel of judges performs thorough evaluations on scores of software products to glean "the best of the best." Unfortunately, the reality was much more mundane.

I don't know what process the winners go through, but I have detailed knowledge of the process for Codie losers. To help you save over $1,000 ($850 membership + $250 contest fee), I will share this process with you:

Process For Losing the Codie Awards [Guaranteed to Work]

Pay $1,100 (very important!)
Get assigned a judge (up to you to set up a meeting!)
Set up a meeting
Reschedule meeting when judge fails to show up for meeting
Repeat steps 3-5 until contest is over
Receive written evaluation from judge which demonstrates that they make up in chutzpah what they lack in integrity

In our case, the "judge" was Paul Cohen, who certainly didn't take off any time from his job at the Beverly Hills public schools on our behalf. His evaluation was that WaveMaker is a "very pricey set of web controls." It doesn't take great technical expertise to observe that this is an odd description of an open source, web-base IDE.

Ah, I thought. The Codie awards manager, Lisa Mitchell will help! After all, she helped arrange the meeting with the judge and knows that the promised meeting never happened. Not surprisingly, she has become as difficult to reach as our judget.

But then there is that ultimate arbiter of justice, the CEO of the SIIA, Ken Wasch. Surely when he sees how egregious our case is, he will at least agree to have another judge at least look at our product. After an initial friendly call, I have heard nothing from him either.

The process for losing the Codies is very transparent. The process for winning is less so.

It's a good thing that "who you know" awards are being replaced by the voice of the open source community. Shame on me for ever doubting it!

Startling scientific discovery: little vegetable bits do not spontaneously dissolve in sink

2009-02-11T17:09:00.000-08:00

For those of you who feel that the life of a hard-charging Silicon Valley CEO is non-stop strategic wheeling and dealing, I submit the following internal memo for a more balanced perspective.

To: All SF Employees
From: Your chief executive officer and primary sink disposal unit
Re: Unwillingness of vegetable matter deposited in sink drain to spontaneously disappear

While I applaud the steadfast perseverance of our intrepid WaveMaker scientists, the fact remains that the bits of carrots left in the sink yesterday did not spontaneously vanish as was no doubt the plan. Nor did the peas left in the sink today.

In fact, vegetable and other materials larger than approximately the head of a pin are remarkably consistent in their reluctance to do anything but rest idly in the sink filter until some poor clod (usually me) comes by to clean them out.

In the future, you are more than welcome to conduct whatever experiments you want in the comfort of your own home. However, in our shared kitchen I would appreciate an approach of "nothing but water down the drain."

Thank you for your kind attention.

- chris

Good Guys - Dropping Like Flies

2009-02-06T13:29:00.001-08:00

Sean Kerner just reported that MySQL president Marten Mickos is leaving Sun. I can't imagine worse news for Sun's efforts to buy a seat at the table for the next generation of computing.

MySQL pioneered the open source business model and is emerging as a key player in cloud computing. It borders on tragic that Sun is unable to inspire and retain executives like Marten.

I had a lunch yesterday with a good friend who is studying innovation. We compared innovation at Sun with innovation at Apple.

In 2000, both Sun and Apple got hit hard. Apple famously recovered. Sun, only somewhat less famously, did not.

Nobody claims that Sun engineers stopped innovating after 2000. It is clear, however, that Sun's management has been ineffective in harnessing that innovation to create a successful business strategy.

I got to know Marten when my last company, Persistence Software, was purchased by Progress Software. Progress was in a huge food fight with MySQL about who owned the MySQL trademark in the US - it's long story (complete with Marten being arrested by a Sherriff at the Progress headquarters), but Marten won.

Marten Mickos proved that he has what it takes to turn innovation into business success. He clearly believes that he can be more successful innovating outside of Sun than within.

Thriving Thru Recession With Head In the Clouds

2009-01-28T17:37:00.000-08:00

Despite the gloomy headlines, WaveMaker is having a great year - our revenues continue to grow over 50% a quarter and we launched a partnership with IBM at last week's Lotusphere. InfoWorld continues to sing WaveMaker's praises as well.

The worldwide recession is sort of like a giant avalanche, sweeping startups and industry titans alike before its path. Having a leadership position in a rapidly growing market like cloud computing is a way to not only survive the recession but come out stronger on the other end.

Benjamin Thompkins has a good post on the bmighty blog about cloud computing as the ultimate recession-proof technology. Here are my top 3 recommendations for surviving today's economic avalanche:

Stay ahead of the destruction - with the economy collapsing, the only safe place is in a market that is growing enough to dampen the blow.
Don't waver in your path - survival mode is all about executing - finding ways to bring in as much revenue as possible on the path you are on. Changing course while the avalanche is bearing down on you is corporate suicide.
Have friend who can help dig you out - when the going gets tough, you soon find out what kind of investor support you have. All VCs are easy to work with when times are good - it is the behavior of VCs in the bad times that separates the bankers from the builders

IBM Gets Seriously Social with WaveMaker

2009-01-22T10:37:00.000-08:00

WaveMaker shared the stage this week with LinkedIn, SalesForce and Skype at IBM's launch of their new collaboration platform, LotusLive. Appropriately enough for a new entrant in the Serious Social market, Lotus Live launched at the Disneyworld resort in Orlando.

Clint Boulton of eWeek had a good description of LotusLive:

"LotusLive is the brand name for meeting, messaging and collaboration applications IBM intends to deliver to partners, who will in turn put them in front of their customers as a SAAS (software as a service) platform this year"

Sean Poulley, the Vice President of Collaboration Services, was the emcee for the very entertaining LotusLive launch presentation (it's not often that you see Crocodile Dundee used to promote cloud collaboration).

After producing a great deal of vapor around the somewhat suspect term Web 2.0 and the even more dodgy term Enterprise 2.0, IBM and LotusLive are finally validating the premise that social networking will be as powerful a force in the enterprise as it has been for the consumer world.

WaveMaker's 15 minutes of fame came via a Social Network Integrator application that we built for LotusLive. Social Network Integrator allows LotusLive users to share files with contacts from any of their social networks (LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc).

Underneath the covers, WaveMaker's Social Network Integrator application was hosted on Amazon EC2, using Rightscale for cloud scaling and Kapow to access contact data from LinkedIn.

Adobe Plays Catchup to WaveMaker...Again!

2009-01-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

Savio Rodriguez has a nice post on the Infoworld blog, entitled Adobe follows WaveMaker's footsteps into the cloud, describing Adobe's latest cloud announcement as a reaction to the WaveMaker Cloud launch last December.

According to ZDNet's Larry Dignan, Adobe is launching a cloud version of their LiveCycle tools running on Amazon EC/2 as a "sandbox" for developers. In contrast, the WaveMaker Cloud development tools are intended for full application development and deployment - out of the sandbox and onto the beach!

WaveMaker is turning out to have much more of a lead in this space than we expected. When we started development almost 2 years ago, we assumed that there would be a number of open development tools targeting the cloud.

Now that we are well into our beta release, we are finding that WaveMaker is more unique than we had hoped for. All the major players who launched before us - Force.com, Coghead, Bungee - have gone down the old fashioned proprietary path.

For customers, this is a lock-in nightmare:

Proprietary languages like Apex force developers to start fresh on yet another language and framework learning curve.

Lack of portability across cloud providers forces companies to pay monopoly pricing to host on a single cloud.

Lack of portability between the cloud and the data center limits the kind of applications companies are willing to put in the cloud.

The result is that any SaaS company that is looking for cloud-based development tools is looking at WaveMaker as a very attractive way to extend their platform. WaveMaker is an open and portable version of the Force.com tools that have helped make SalesForce the 500 pound gorilla of the SaaS world.

KANA was the first major software vendor to use WaveMaker as the customer-facing dev tool for their call center platform. Stay tuned for our next big partner announcement in the coming week!

Complexity Kills: SOA = CORBA 2.0 = DOA

2009-01-07T10:43:00.000-08:00

Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group has declared the death of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Like CORBA before it, SOA was a vendor-driven "market" of daunting complexity. Also like CORBA before it, SOA collapsed under the weight of its own learning curve.

I attended the Gartner architecture conference last month, where 1,000 corporate architects gathered to discuss the state of SOA. The conversation was dominated by architects quizzing each other on what SOA really meant and whether any of them had really implemented it yet. That is scary for a technology that is long in the tooth from a buzz cycle perspective.

There was exactly 1 presentation I saw that presented a strong business case for the SOA architecture. That was by the CIO of National City Bank, which was recently bought by PNC and whose SOA architecture may or may not survive the acquisition.

Anne Thomas Manes also points out that while the heavyweight SOA architecture is falling out of favor, lightweight architectures based on SaaS and cloud services are on the rise. WaveMaker and other platform as a service (PaaS) vendors are delivering increased flexibility and productivity without the huge upfront investment of SOA.

Here is why SOA died and how the more flexible cloud services approach is winning:

SOA blew the elevator pitch. Just explaining what SOA is takes longer than the average business manager's attention span. Like spinach, business sponsors are assured that SOA is "good for you." In contrast, the value of building cloud-based apps that work like Facebook and iGoogle is easy to convey, because business sponsors (or their kids) use useful web apps all the time.
SOA was more about vendor enrichment than customer enrichment. I would argue that the SOA market was driven by the need for application server vendors to find add-on products that they could charge for once JBoss and Spring took the money out of the core app server market. In contrast, cloud services are growing organically as companies like SalesForce and WaveMaker make cloud development tools available that enable architects to build business applications based on best practices drawn from successful consumer sites like gmail and facebook.
SOA swims against the tide of IT democratization. In retrospect, many companies that adopted SOA did so as a way for core IT to maintain control over every single computing event that occurs within an enterprise. In contrast, SaaS and cloud computing break the IT monopoly on compute cycles and deliver compelling cost and time to market benefits to the business.

Just as with CORBA, SOA introduced some useful concepts around enterprise integration and service reuse. However, just as Web 1.0 killed CORBA by introducing a much easier way to distribute applications, Web 2.0 has killed SOA with a much easier way to integrate web services.

The Cloud Is Angry and Other Lessons From Gartner

2008-12-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

I attended the Gartner Application Development Conference this week and drank from the proverbial firehouse as Gartner analysts presented their vision for cloud computing

Anthony Bradley, the Web 2.0 analyst for Gartner, beat the drum for front end tools (mashup builders) to complement back end SOA systems. His take was "mashups take the benefits of SOA and make them visible to users - mashups are the face of SOA."

Mark Driver, the open source software analyst for Gartner, said that cloud computing is early in its maturity cycle. He said, "if the cloud were a child, it would be an angry two year old. The challenge for the industry now is how to make it through the terrible twos."

Mark also pointed out some big benefits for IT with cloud computing. "The cloud enables rapid application maintenance - iterating application functionality on a daily basis." The apps can change as quickly as the business situation changes, making IT much more of a real partner in business change rather than an impediment to business change.

Mark introduced the idea of a cloud development platform or platform as a service (PaaS), noting that in PaaS, the developer should never encounter the concept of a server. Instead, the platform abstracts all deployment complexity from the developer, making it ideal for business unit developers who don't have deployment resources readily at hand.

According to Gartner, the important criteria for a cloud development platform include:

Interoperability: how well does the platform integrate with other web assets like open id and google maps?
Collaboration: how well does the platform support source code control and social programming (Facebook meets SVN)
RIA & mobile clients: cross browser and cross smart-phone support. According to Mark, reach wins over richness - supporting more browsers is more important than supporting more widgets.
Legacy: ability to integrate with enterprise data, security and web services
Performance: ability to scale significantly with no additional effort/programming
Longevity: the market momentum of the platform vendor - will they be around in 3 years? The winner will be less about the raw technology and more about the quality of partners and customers the vendor has attracted.

This is a particularly interesting list for us at WaveMaker, as we just released the WaveMaker cloud development platform that does quite well against Gartner's list. In particular, WaveMaker scores highly interoperability, both of component and of applications. WaveMaker is the first cloud development platform to offer portability between the cloud and the data center.

Gartner believes that the market for cloud development tools is very similar to the 4GL market of the early 90s. They see many innovative vendors today offering unique/proprietary solutions, thinning out over the next three years to a handful of winners. Naturally we are doing everything we can to make sure that WaveMaker is one of those winners!

WaveMaker Launches First Open-Source IDE for the Cloud

2008-12-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

The biggest problem with cloud development platforms to date has been lack of portability. For example, what if I want to move my cloud application from Coghead to some other platform? Answer - you can't.

WaveMaker changed that today by releasing the first open-source IDE for the cloud. With WaveMaker, you are no longer locked in to developing for a particular cloud. You can access our studio by downloading our open source version or access the cloud version of the studio directly (hosted on Amazon EC2).

On EC2, we are using Rightscale to manage scaling, load balancing and failover for our multi-tenant studio. We have also integrated with Elastra to provide scalable database connectivity.

Here are some things you can do with WaveMaker's cloud edition

On-site or on demand development: create applications with the open source studio (download to your desktop).
Portable cloud deployment: with one click, deploy applications to the cloud, to the desktop or to the data center.
Open source cloud IDE: migrate applications from the hosted cloud version to the free open source version whenever you want.

The WaveMaker cloud edition beta is free for development. Deployment will be through a paid Amazon machine image (AMI), with pricing starting at $0.30 per hour.

Check out the new WaveMaker cloud edition here

The Soul of the Web - Why Ajax Standards Matter

2008-11-19T08:54:00.000-08:00

I spoke on a panel at Mashup Camp this week on why Ajax Standards matter. I was quoted by Doug Henschen of Intelligent Enterprise as saying that we are locked in a struggle for the soul of the web, so I thought I would expand on that theme.

Just because the web has been open so far doesn't mean that it will stay that way. By open, I mean that content has been searchable, linkable and servable without paying fees.

Flash and Silverlight, arguably the two market-leading technology toolkits for rich media applications are not open. You cannot search Flash content, you cannot link to it and if you want to serve up flash content on your web site, you need to pay for a server license.

If the future of the web lies in rich media and if these trends continue, we may well see a very different world emerge from Web 2.0.

More importantly, Flash and Silverlight work by installing a proprietary plug-in to your browser, thus opting out of the entire browser infrastructure. If you are a plug-in vendor, your incentive is to keep the browser as dumb as possible.

The worse the underlying browser is at rendering rich widgets and media, the more developers and users will want your plug-in. If you are both the vendor of a browser (say IE) as well as the proponent of a plug-in (say Silverlight), then the incentives get truly twisted.

WaveMaker has a big stake in this debate because we chose to build our WYSIWYG development tools on top of the Dojo Toolkit. We picked Dojo because WaveMaker is targeting enterprise developers who need not just nice color pickers but also sortable and pageable grids, solid internationalization and accessibility capabilities.

Ajax standards groups like the Open Ajax Alliance (under the leadership of Jon Ferraiolo)serve a important role today in helping to highlight the differences between open solutions like Dojo and proprietary solutions. They also are helping to drive the maturity of open Ajax toolkits by focussing attention on important areas like security and internationalization.

Microsoft was the rendering engine for client/server, which paid them enormous dividends. Microsoft IE was somewhat accidentally the victor in rendering engine for Web 1.0 after Netscape fumbled their lead, although they were never really able to monitize this particular monopoly.

Make no mistake - Microsoft and Adobe aim to have their proprietary plug-ins, aka pseudo-browsers, become the rendering engines for the next generation of the Web. Without a strong push for open Ajax standards, they just might get their way.

A good day for entrepreneurs

2008-11-05T15:41:00.000-08:00

OK, ok, so this is totally off topic for a tech blog focused on the future of the web, but I just loved this graphic and couldn't resist.

Entrepreneurship is all about changing the world by thinking differently. Startups work best by challenging conventional wisdom and doing things nobody even imagined, much less thought were possible.

Yes it was a tough campaign and yes we have a number of big messes on our hands, not least of which the economic climate for technology startups. On the other hand, what a great day for America's ability to reimagine itself!

Open Source Marketing Metrics - From 0 to 700 Customers in One Year

2008-10-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

One important goal of open source software is to drive rapid adoption of a new product. Effectively, open source downloads become a marketing channel for producing qualified sales leads.

Yet there are not many metrics available by which to judge the success of an open source channel. What percent of web site visitors should download the product? What percent of downloads should register in the community? Finally, the all-important question: what percent of registered downloads should convert to paying customers?

We have been tracking downloads and conversions religiously (with lots of help from smart people like Marten Mickos at MySQL, Brian Gentile at JasperSoft, Rod Johnson at SpringSource and Andrew Aitken at the Olliance Group). I thought it would be useful to summarize what we are seeing in our community around downloads, product adoption and conversion to paying customers.

Metrics since product launch (3/08)

The punch line is that WaveMaker will have over 700 paying customers by the end of the year, both through direct community adoption and through channel partners.

29,261 web visitors per month
9,972 downloads per month (28% of visitors)
1,132 download registrations (e.g., new community members) per month (11% of downloads, 4% of visitors)
600 community postings per month (11% of downloads, 4% of visitors)
1,050 marketing leads per month
700 paying customers by 12/08 - including direct and channel customers (through OEMs)

What Drives Web visitors?

WaveMaker is an easy to use development tool for web applications. Our motto is: if you can use a browser, you can build a web app with WaveMaker. The main driver for WaveMaker web visitors is new product releases. With each new product release, the open source network springs into action via sites like SourceForge and FreshMeat, as well as specialty sites like dzone and Ajaxian.

For three weeks after a new release, we see the web site volume goes up by a factor of 5 over the previous 30 day moving average. After that, web traffic settles down to a new, higher level (typically about 20% higher than the previous moving average).

What Drives Download conversions?

The percent of web visitors who download has inched up from roughly 20% of visitors to 28% of visitors as we have gone through various iterations of our home page. As the messages have gotten simpler and the graphics more compelling, the download rates have climbed.

What Drives Community conversions?

So far, conversions from download to actually registering with the community has been our Achilles heel. One interesting metric is that the conversion rate goes down when the download volumes go up and we aren't really sure why (could be as simple as the Drupal registration engine getting backed up).

Converting Open Source Downloads to Customers

Once developers have registered with the community, they get regular newsletters and emails from our field technical people. We have found that by far the most effective marketing activity is our personal emails from field technical people to potential enterprise prospects. Instrumenting our email outreach program is another important todo for our marketing team.

These conversion numbers are pretty lumpy - a small number of channel partners can have a big impact on customer numbers, particularly at the beginning. Most of our leverage at WaveMaker has come from small systems integrators and ISVs, both of which act as channels to amplify the activity that is already being generated by our open source channel.

Summary

Converting web visitors into paying customers remains more of an art than science. What we have proven is that for enterprise software, it is possible to attract a large number of paying customers in a short time using an open source channel.

What is NOT Cloud Computing?

2008-10-23T08:44:00.001-07:00

I spoke at the Cloud Summit last week put on by M.R. Rangaswami and enjoyed as always the giddy enthusiasm with which Silicon Valley embraces each new technology wave. Cloud computing is custom made for Silicon Valley - it is poorly defined, seemingly vast and has the potential to change human life as we know it (at least for those of us who live in Silicon Valley).

Of course, we have our fair share of naysayers (like Larry and Richard), as well as theories about why those naysayers are down on cloud computing.

Since so many people are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, I thought it would be useful to look not at what cloud computing is but at what cloud computing isn't.

Cloud computing is the hardware equivalent of automatic teller machines. The whole idea is that you don't have to deal with people to get your application deployed, scaled, monitored and managed. Therefore anything that gets between your application and the API to the data center in the sky is taking you away from the cloud.

The other important - and to date largely unrealized - promise of the cloud is choice, aka freedom from lock-in. Today, customers are often locked into a particular cloud provider just as surely as they are locked into their in-house data center. Moving forward, you should have the ability to change clouds providers as easily as you change cell phone providers.

Larry Whistles Past the (Cloud) Graveyard

2008-09-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

Larry Ellison recently unleashed a tub-thumping tirade against cloud computing covered by Ben Worthen (with further comments from Daya Baran, Giva Perry and Dan Farber) . Here is a quote from Larry:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing... The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.

Now as usual with big whoppers told by people in fear of their checkbooks, Larry's rant has an element of truth. There is much cloud lipstick being sloshed on many a barnyard animal these days. But behind all the buzzwords, a basic shift is occuring - the wholesale outsourcing of core business applications.

Yes, this is a return to timesharing, but this ain't your grandfather's timesharing. It is interesting that Larry was a huge supporter of thin client computing when it threatened his enemy Microsoft but is now a detractor of the son of thin client when it threatens his own rice bowl.

Forrester research has a simple chart that illustrates Larry's dilemma - he paid $30B for a collection of low growth businesses, making Oracle is the Computer Associates of the new millennium (and we know where this strategy got CA).

Larry's rant is an extraordinary example of whistling past the graveyard. Oracle's huge transformation over the last 10 years has been from an infrastructure company (databases & middleware) to an applications company (ERP, CRM, SFA ect). Now, just as this transformation is completed, along comes an infrastructure that will obsolete all the applications Oracle just got done rolling up.

No wonder he sounds ticked - you would be too if you just spent more than $30B (see Oracle acquisitions chart below) on a bunch of wasting assets that are going to be shafted by the Cloud/SaaS shift just as Siebel's market share was eviscerated by SalesForce.

The dead giveaway is that Larry's rant focuses on the metric most important to him - profitability - while ignoring the metric most important to customers - value. Larry knows that customers are deserting him in droves, what really angers him is that he can't make as much money in the SaaS world.

Why Open Source Is Euro-Chic

2008-09-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

Larry Augustin recently wrote about the differences between how Europe and the US view the open source software market. His comments came after attending the Olliance Think Tank conference in Paris this week (tough assignment, that).

He identified a number of differences between how Europe and the US view open source. For example, he gives the primary European reason for adoption open source as wanting to avoid vendor lock-in, while the primary reason for adopting open source in the US is cost.

While recognizing the differences, I think that the open source business model is tending to converge on the dual-license approach that I outlined in the Silverado Rules for Open Source Software. So what accounts for these regional differences?

I believe the biggest single factor to explain these differences is the underlying attitude towards Microsoft. In the US, where Microsoft is seen as a successful, if aggressive, competitor, adoption open source is a business decision, that is to say based on cost and ROI.

In Europe, where Microsoft is seen as a malignant force, adoption of open source is seen as a political decision, that is to say based on and ideology that trumps business considerations. Viewed this way, the differences described by Larry between the two geographies are very consistent, particularly if you just insert the word Microsoft at strategic points.

For example, on the first observation, the primary reason for adopting open source in Europe is to avoid [Microsoft] lock-in; while the primary reason in the US is cost, as Microsoft lock-in per se is not seen as a bad thing.

At the end of the day, open source is not so much an ideology as an evolution in how software is developed and distributed. For WaveMaker, open source is a great way to accelerate adoption of our free JavaScript download for building web applications.

The Revenge of Zaphod BeebleBrox - Why 2 In a Box CEOs Never Work

2008-09-17T18:46:00.001-07:00

Matt Asay broke the news that the talented COO of SpringSource, Neelan Choksi, left the company recently just as SpringSource announced 250% annual growth. Savio Rodriguez expanded on the theme and wondered why an exec would leave a growing company.

I have no particular insight into Neelan's situation, but I have a lot of insight into the difficulties of managing a startup with a CEO and a COO (at SpringSource, Rod Johnson is the CEO and Neelan was the COO). I have found that splitting the CEO/COO in a small company, also known as "two in a box" is pure trouble.

Two in a box means putting two people in charge of essentially the same job. You don't need an MBA to see that there is great potential for mischief here. The inevitable conclusion of two in a box is always the same … and then there was one.

The whole thing reminds me of Zaphod BeebleBrox, the two headed character who was always arguing with himself.

Here's how the Zaphod BeebleBros brainstorm pitched by the board: "this will be great! Zaphod here (the CEO) will be the external spokesperson for the company, while Beeblebrox (the COO) will be the internal, get it done guy."

Needless to say, it never works quite this way. Even when you have two really strong players (which I believe is the case at SpringSource), it is extremely difficult in a small company to keep from stepping on each other's toes. Here are just a few of challenges in a two-in-the box startup team:

Who's vision? Inevitably, there are differences in vision between the CEO and COO and these differences always come out at awkward times.
Maybe I'll get a better answer from mom. Any exec who gets an answer from datd they don't like can always try asking mom.
The buck stops over there. Particularly for difficult decisions, there is a natural tendency for each exec to palm off some of the tougher calls to their counterpart.

Where have all the 4GLs Gone?

2008-09-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

Brad Feld recently wrote a blog post entitled, What Happened To The 4GL? In it, he describes the difficulty of working with today's web development frameworks:

This summer I spent some time playing around with Google AppEngine.... It didn't take long before I realized I needed to really understand how to program in Python to do anything.

People often ask whether Ruby on Rails is a competitor to WaveMaker. My response is that WaveMaker is for people who don't want to learn a new language to build web apps, RoR is for people who do.

In Proustian fashion, Brad looks at the new cloud computing tools in hopes of recapturing that sense of power that comes from working with a well-designed 4GL:

When I was playing with Google AppEngine, I kept waiting for the 4GL "aha moment." That's the moment I had using Clarion and Access where I realized how easy it was to do certain things. That moment never came with Google AppEngine - the deeper I got, the more confused I got.

This is the elephant under the table in web programming today - it is no longer possible for mere mortals to build basic business applications. Even formerly technical guys like myself and Brad are intimidated by the bookshelf worth of O'Reilly books you need to read just to get started with web development.

WaveMaker has a very strong 4GL pedigree and is funded by Mitchell Kertzman (of PowerBuilder fame) and Roger Sippl (of Informix 4GL fame). Our belief is that the time has come for a 4GL web development solution.

Ten years ago, there were loads of ways to build client/server apps easily - PowerBuilder, MS Access, Lotus Notes, Filemaker. None of those tools have made the leap to the web, leaving a huge market vacuum.

It has been so long since there have been decent tools for non-expert developers that people have literally forgotten what a 4GL even looks like. The best proof of this is the many comments on Brad's post by people who think that coding frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django are reasonable substitutes for a 4GL.

This is not to slight Rails and Django, just to say that these products are targeting making hard-core developers even more productive. They are absolutely not appropriate for visual developers who don't want to do any programming in the first place.

Startup reality check: launching versus landing

2008-09-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

While startups always make a big deal about introducing new products, the real birth of a company comes not when you launch your first product but when you land your first big customer.

Here's the difference: it only takes a demo to launch a product, it takes a business model to land a customer. Thus the scariest time in a startup's lifecycle is the period between shipping the product and closing the first big customer deal (this is period that the VCs call "proving that the dogs will eat the dog food").

In true ClueTrain Manifesto fashion, product launches are largely a vendor driven activity, that is to say mostly wishful thinking and hand waving about your new, improved, bright shiny thing. Getting a customer to dig deep and pony up 7 figures for your bright shiny thing puts you in a whole different league.

Launching answers the following questions:

Can we give a good 5 minute demo? Silicon Valley is littered with technology in search of a market.
Can we sound like we know who might want to buy this in the abstract?

Landing a big customer answers much more interesting questions:

Is my product solid enough for somebody else to bet their job on?
Does my product solve such a big problem for that person that they are willing to bypass much more established, safer vendors to bet on an unknown startup?
Is my business model credible enough that another company will bet their business on our being around 5 years from now?

WaveMaker launched our visual Ajax development tool in February. Yesterday, WaveMaker announced a 7 figure deal with KANA. KANA sells customer service software and has over 700 customers, including 60% of the Fortune 100. They are also one of 16 strategic partners of IBM's WebSphere division.

The most exciting element of this deal is that KANA will ship the WaveMaker Studio as a built-in customization tool for their call center platform (similar to what the Force.com platform does for SalesForce.com). For WaveMaker, this will give us 700 licensed customers by the end of the year, putting WaveMaker in the top tier of Ajax tool providers in one fell swoop.

Cool technology and $2.50 will buy you a latte at Starbucks. Having a $70M company bet their future on your product puts you into the running for the Next Big Thing! Congratulations to the whole WaveMaker team for taking the step from demoware to solving hard customer problems.

Online Communities: Open Versus Gated

2008-08-28T15:56:00.000-07:00

Online communities are all the rage, but just like in the real world, online communities can be warm welcoming neighborhoods or cold, haughty gated communities.

Connie Benson at the Marketing 2.0 Blog has a good post on the importance of a community manager in keeping a company connected to its users. But the community manager themselves are limited by how motivated the community participants are.

It is extraordinary to me how low energy most enterprise software company communities are. With the examples of vibrant communities at MySQL and Spring, you would think that companies like Oracle and IBM could follow suit.

I think the real rub here is that it is hard to have a vibrant community with a closed-source product. Maybe this was possible in the olden days, with certain fanatical user products like Borland's Delphi. But increasingly, open sourcing a product is a prerequisite for obtaining an engaged community.

This sets up a contrast between open communities, where anyone can participate with little or no effort, and gated communities like IBM's labyrinth of interlocking forums, where just creating a user account is a daunting, 15-20 minute exercise.

In the week since the launch of WaveMaker 4, we have gotten 20,000 downloads and over 1,000 new members registered into the WaveMaker community. Now comes the hard part - turning newbies into active community participants.

In our case, I think that conversion is made much easier by being an open source product. I am not making the "freetarded" argument that free is always good, just that open source brings with it an expectation of community that makes creating a real community dramatically easier.

Tech-Smart, User-Stupid - Why Software Startups Fail

2008-08-26T17:57:00.001-07:00

Over the course of three software startups and 10 years of teaching entrepreneurship, I have seen one flaw kill more software startups than all the other flaws combined. That flaw is caring more about your technology than your customers - failed software startups are smart about technology and stupid about who is going to use that technology.

Inexperienced technology entrepreneurs usually almost always focus more on what their technology can do, not what the market needs. If you don't have a specific customer in mind when you build a product, you are performing the marketing equivalent of walking outside on a sunny day and hoping to get hit by lightning.

Not having a clue about your intended market leads to all sorts of misguided behavior. In particular, there are two dead give-aways to user-stupid companies:

Dog ball product management. There is an old joke about dogs and balls where the punchline is "because he can." Most of the Ajax products on the market today are stuffed with features for which the best explanation is that the developer added it just because they could. For example, there are roughly 2 bizillion Ajax toolkits out there, but every week someone introduces a new one, figuring no doubt that what the world really needs right now is yet another color picker widget. Adding random features does not make you look cool, it just makes you look confused.

Leaky marketing. When you have no idea who your target customer is, all you can focus on is your competition. Just like a celebrity stalker believes that if they scare off all the boyfriends, then the supermodel will have no choice but to fall in love with them, the leaky marketer believes that if they take a leak on everyone else's products, then the market will have to come to them. Among other problems, when you have a number of companies in a small market doing this to each other, all you really do is convince potential customers to wait until there is a serious provider for the technology. Making other companies look small does not make you look big, it just convinces customers to stay with IBM another year.

The simplest antidote to being user-stupid is recruit a business partner who is externally focused. Entrepreneurship is a team sport - it takes a passionate techie and an equally passionate business person to make an idea go (think Gates/Ballmer, Jobs/Wozniak, Ellison/Miner). Successful innovation happens when a company is user focused and tech smart about how to solve that user's needs.

For more on this topic, see Top 10 Business Idea Mistakes.

WaveMaker in Top 10 Apple Downloads

2008-08-20T23:40:00.000-07:00

WaveMaker was selected as a Staff Pick for the Apple download site, and broke into the top 10 Apple downloads today, edging out Google Earth for the tenth slot!

WaveMaker 4 features a Mac installer and the WaveMaker Ajax Studio runs best in the Safari browser (of course, to be fair, almost everything that runs in a browser runs best in Safari).

WaveMaker's visual studio lowers the learning curve for building Ajax apps and greatly increases productivity over traditional hand-coded Javascript web clients.

WaveMaker uses a Model-View-Controller approach to building Ajax web applications, making it an ideal tool for developers who are familiar with Apple's xCode development tools (or any other visual development tool for that matter).

WaveMaker was also written up on the MacNN web site as a one stop shop for developing web applications. MacNN also particularly taken by how WaveMaker democratizes the development of web applications:

The folks at WaveMaker think big, calling their Visual Ajax Studio 4.0 web app development tool "a fundamental breakthrough" -- and they may just be right. In a demonstration for MacNN it took about three minutes to build a simple database web app -- something that traditionally takes a team of developers to manage the complex weaving of web and server functions. This could be especially good news for the growing number of Mac Developers, since WaveMaker is browser-based.

WaveMaker 4 Introduces RAD For Ajax

2008-08-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

Since the concept of Rapid Application Development (RAD) was invented in 1991 by James Martin, much has changed in the IT world. Web-based application, web services and software as a service have dramatically changed application development. This in turn drives a need to update the concepts behind RAD, particularly for web-based applications.

What the web promises to add to traditional RAD is a more effective model for assembly and distribution of business applications. While newer development models like Agile and Extreme programming have gotten more attention recently, good old-fashioned RAD 2.0 has the potential to have a bigger impact in how business applications are delivered.

The essence of rapid application development is to convert database schema information (tables, columns, primary and foreign keys) into graphic interface forms. These forms in turn allow a developer to create, read, update and delete information from tables (while preserving relationships between tables)

Ruby on Rails (RoR) has a clear lead in bringing RAD to the web. RoR scaffolding allows developers to create simple Ajax applications quickly based on a database schema. Yet Ruby on Rails is focused on developers who work primarily by writing Ruby and Javascript code inside of an IDE. What about developers who want a visual way to build Ajax applications?

WaveMaker provides a RAD tool for Ajax developers, allowing developers to create rich internet applications without having to learn complex coding languages. WaveMaker 4 adds two significant features that put it at the top of the class in web application productivity: LiveForms and Templating.

LiveForms: the most common task in a web application is to add functionality to create, read, update and delete information from a database table. Usually, this requires separate forms to create, update and delete data. WaveMaker 4 introduces the idea of a data and activity aware form: a single LiveForm widget is all you need to create, update and delete a row. More importantly, when you connect a LiveForm to a Grid, the form is aware of whether an item in the grid is selected, and so dynamically enables and disables buttons for update and delete.
Templating: when we work with WaveMaker customers, the first big task in every project is to configure a set of widgets to match the company's user interface guidelines. With templates, developers have the ability to turn a predefined and styled set of widgets into a reusable template. This is a big change from client/server RAD, where there was less focus on the specific corporate look and feel. When you consider that a typical user interface can have 80-100 widgets just to set up the headers, columns and footers, having a few well-designed templates at the beginning of a project can be a huge help!

WaveMaker 4 Introduces Point and Click Ajax (Post 1 of 4)

2008-08-14T17:44:00.000-07:00

In February, WaveMaker introduced the first visual development environment for Ajax applications. Today, we have taken another big leap forward in productivity, by launching WaveMaker 4, a point and click development platform capable of creating a fully deployed Ajax application in just 9 mouse clicks!

I'm not talking about some proprietary hairball here - in 9 clicks, WaveMaker takes you from a blank screen to a fully deployed Ajax application complete with Postgres Plus database connectivity and running on a standard Tomcat/Spring/Hibernate server.

With WaveMaker 4, we choose 4 areas where we wanted to be best in class. Those areas are:

Lowest learning curve - WaveMaker 4 is the easiest way to start building Ajax applications.
Highest productivity - our WYSIWYG Ajax studio delivers best in class productivity for basic business applications.
Sheer beauty - our Dojo-based Ajax client produces jaw-dropping user interfaces.
Easiest mashup tool - nobody delivers a better mashup tool for web services Java classes and databases than WaveMaker.

Over the next few days I will address each of these areas and talk about how we achieved our goals.

Ajax Learning Curve - WaveMaker Stomps Dreamweaver

WaveMaker exists to democratize web development. With WaveMaker, you can point and click your way to a running web application in just 9 clicks and without a single line of programming. We believe this will appeal to two kinds of developers: Java developers who don't want to muck with Javascript, and non-expert developers who want to avoid as much coding as possible period.

For Ajax client development, Eclipse, Netbeans, Aptana and Dreamweaver are all good tools, but require you to be a Javascript (or Flex) expert to build a web application, something that many Java developers would like to avoid. On the SaaS side, products like Coghead and Force.com have a low learning curve, but require you to use their proprietary language, architecture and hosting to just get started - a steep trade-off for ease of use.

How easy is it? Let's walk through the 9 click scenario:

Point and Click Ajax - How To Build an Ajax Application In 9 Clicks

Click 1: create new project. Start the WaveMaker studio. Note that it runs in a browser - note further that WaveMaker studio was built in WaveMaker, a pretty good indication of the power of the tool itself. Note that just for fun I am running WaveMaker in the same browser where I am writing my blog post - just because I can :-)

Click 2: import database (Model). WaveMaker can import the database schema information from Postgres or any other major database, thanks to our underlying use of Hibernate. WaveMaker comes with a schema editor, so you can actually create your database schema within WaveMaker as well. Importing the database gives you the Model part of a model-view-controller architecture.

Clicks 3, 4, 5: create application template (View). Open page designer, open template chooser, drag application template onto WaveMaker canvas. Templates are collections of pre-styled widgets that can give you a full UI in a single click, including a template that inserts a standard search box, list data grid and detail live form. Creating the widget layout gives you the view part of the model-view-controller architecture.

Click 6: create live variable (Controller). Our live variable will hold database customer information. WaveMaker uses a model-view-controller architecture that greatly simplifies the development of web applications. The Live Variables are the controller elements in WaveMaker's model-view-controller architecture. LiveVariables automatically update themselves when the underlying data changes, allowing the widget to be concerned only with data display and creating a clean separation between the Model and the View elements in the architecture.

Click 7: connect customer data to grid. WaveMaker provides an intuitive interface to connect the customer live variable to the data grid. Have you noticed that within the studio you get live data into your widgets? This means that the application is actually running while you design it, eliminating the typical build-compile-run-debug time suck. Is that the coolest thing ever or what?

Click 8: connect selected customer item to customer edit form. WaveMaker exposes the currently selected item as a data source that you can provide as input to the Live Form. The Live Form is data aware, so it automatically configures itself with the appropriate editors to support the underlying data schema, including auto-configuring drop-down selects to set foreign key relationships - seriously cool stuff!

Click 9: press run to deploy your application onto the built-in Tomcat server.

Presto - while any other Ajax developer is still waiting for Eclipse to load, you have built and deployed a complete web application. Give yourself a hand, and give the WaveMaker engineering team a hand to while you're at it!

Postscript

Our celebration launch included some very cold vodka shots and a group pose with the company mascot, a surfboard. Derek claims that if you chill the vodka enough and drink it in one gulp you won't get a hangover. I was not able to confirm this claim - maybe we just need a better freezer!

Development Tools For Cloud Computing - Two Paths

2008-08-06T11:54:00.000-07:00

For cloud computing to take off, there need to be tools available that enable a developer to build and deploy an application without having to download anything to their desktop. This requires an on-demand development tool that sits on top of the cloud and provides a development Platform as a Service (PaaS).

There are two paths that a vendor can take to create a development platform for cloud computing: cloud-first or tool-first.

Cloud-first approach to PaaS: first build a cloud platform, then build a development tool that runs on top of it. This is the approach pioneered by Force.com and followed by Coghead and Bungee Labs.

Tool-first approach to PaaS: first build a development platform that is host-able tool (e.g., studio runs in a browser), then "push" that platform into the cloud. This is the approach taken by WaveMaker.

For Force.com, it made a great deal of sense to take the cloud-first approach. SalesForce.com already had a robust cloud platform and expertise in building proprietary development tools to create their CRM application. There was also no requirement to make Force.com work on any other cloud, because SalesForce is aiming to be the only cloud you will ever need for all your enterprise apps.

For most software vendors, however, the cloud-first development process has distinct disadvantages. First of all, it puts you in the data center operations business, which requires a very different DNA than software development. Next, it makes development itself difficult, because the cloud adds a level of indirection and complexity to all development tasks. Finally, you will be forced to do cloud port eventually to get to a SaaS cloud people want to deploy on, like Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine (assuming they ever exit the Python ghetto).

A tool-first approach to PaaS development is much more straightforward. You start by creating a host-able development studio (pretty much rules out Eclipse plugins) and do your build and test on standard hardware. After you have build a solid product, you add multi-tenancy to the studio and customize deployment for your cloud of choice (or use a partner like Elastra to do the deployment and administration for you).

A final oddity of the cloud-first vendors is that they have all delivered proprietary development platforms. This provides a "roach motel" level of lock-in - your logic and data can checkin, but just try moving them to another RIA or Ajax platform! Again, SalesForce can throw its 500-pound gorilla weight around and make the Apex language successful. It is hard to imagine, however, that 5 years from now people who have learned the Coghead language will be in more demand than, say, Java developers.

Mashup Definition: Visualized Web Services

2008-07-23T18:48:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin, the marketing guru, defines a mashup as a distinct way of spreading ideas. In particular, Web 2.0 mashups allow developers to combine interesting data and then visualize that data through a web application. In practice, a mashup requires a data source and a web visualization platform.

WaveMaker and Xignite announced their own bit of mashup magic today.

Xignite provides financial data as a web service. Real-time financial data that would otherwise cost a minimum of $50K to access through Reuters or Bloomberg is available at a fraction of that cost through Xignite. These services can include foreign exchange pricing, commodities pricing and real time stock quotes.

The problem is that it takes a web application platform to call the Xignite web service, marshall the resulting data and display it in a web page. That's where WaveMaker comes in. With Wavemaker, a web developer can create a ticker widget that calls Xignite services in less than 5 minutes.

Click here to see the Exignite/WaveMaker ticker example. Click here for more Web 2.0 definitions.

Ajax Master Class Webinar Series

2008-07-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

While there are many entry level tutorials on Ajax, there are relatively few advanced training classes for Ajax in general and Dojo in particular. Over the next 3 months, WaveMaker will offer a series of advanced courses on Dojo development.

Ajax File Upload/Download Master Tutorial
29 July 2008, 11am PT
Matt Small, Senior Software Engineer, WaveMaker

File Upload and Download in Ajax applications can be tricky. This tutorial provides introduction to upload and download widget configuration and their backing Java services. Advanced topics include writing uploaded files to a database and serving files directly from database content.

Debugging Ajax Applications With Firebug Master Tutorial
26 August 2008, 11am PT
Ed Callahan, Director of Technical Services, WaveMaker

Where there is development, there is debugging. In this session, we will discuss techniques for debugging issues commonly encountered while developing Ajax web-apps. We will use the Firebug add-on to Firefox to debug client side errors. We will also discuss the logging features available in the WaveMaker framework to diagnose server side issues.

Dojo Data Grid Master Tutorial23 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.

Gullible marketing

2008-07-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

I used to think that marketing had to do with adjectives: better, shinier, fat-free. I now think marketing has to do with nouns and gullibility - let me explain.

Gullible marketing is based on the premise that customers believe everything that they hear. You assume that a customer cannot distinguish one company's hype (shiny toaster) from another's (fat-free toaster).

In gullible marketing, you cannot win be asserting that you do things better than your competitors. You can only win by talking about different things than any of your competitors.

This brings us to the buzzword-filled world of Web 2.0. It is almost impossible to differentiate one RIA, Ajax, Saas-enabled development tool from another. In the gullible marketing world, Backbase, Nexaweb, Jackbe, Appcelerator and WaveMaker all look the same (if we all merged, we could call ourselves Back-nexa-jack-app-wave).

Gullible marketing would say that no customer can distinguish between our buzzword-laden pitches without a great deal of effort. Thus any time they hear similar-sounding claims from two vendors they get a sort of used-car salesman feeling that leaves them confused and dejected.

Vendor 1: Bright and shiny Ajax, RIA, Web 2.0 tools!
Vendor 2: Brighter, shinier and velvet stippled RIA, Enterprise Web 2.0 tools!!
Customer: sigh…I guess I'll wait to see what Microsoft gives me

Once customers are confused, they are likely to do nothing at all, just wait for the market develop to a point where there is a clear market leader. As a vendor, then, the trick is to say something unique to customers that they aren't hearing from anyone else and hence aren't confused about.

Avoid adjective-driven differentiation. In the tech world, the adjectives faster, better and cheaper have been overused to the point of meaningless
Stake out a unique nouns. Focus your messaging on something that nobody else is saying. For example, WaveMaker is the only browser-based web development tool that you can ship as a part of your application - which is a handy thing for ISVs.
Start with small nouns. The implicit market size of the noun you stake out should be roughly equivalent to the size and momentum of your company. If you are a small company, try to own a little noun first. For example, shipping a browser-based customization tool with your application is going to only appeal to ISV's trying to web-enable their products, a relatively small segment of the web development space.

Another way of explaining gullible marketing is that customers believe none of what they hear from vendors, but that would be too depressing for me as a vendor to contemplate, so I prefer to think of them as gullible instead.

Buzzwords 2.0: What is Web 2.0? What is RIA? What is Ajax?

2008-06-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

The much-hyped but poorly defined terms Web 2.0, Rich Internet Application (RIA) and Ajax are best understood when they are defined together.

Buzzwords represent job security for entrepreneurs like me who would be practically unemployable were it not for our secret knowledge of the true meaning of words like Web 2.0. However, even I must admit that these Buzzwords 2.0 get in the way of clear communication.

In addition, while there are many standalone definitions of terms like Web 2.0, it is much easier to understand these buzzwords mean by considering them together. With that in mind, here are my definitions of Web 2.0, Rich Internet Application and Ajax, complete with helpful graphics:

Web 2.0 represents a market shift in consumer attention from expert-generated content (Yahoo) to user-generated content (Google)
Rich Internet Applications represents a requirements shift for more interactive, PC-like web sites to simplify consumer creation of content (Blogger, MySpace)
Ajax is an architectural shift to support RIA requirements

Definition of Web 2.0 - Shift In Consumer Attention

Consumer eyeballs still rule the web. The huge power shift over the last 5 years has been from expert-driven content (which could be created using expert tools like Adobe Dreamweaver) to user-driven content (which requires web based tools that are easy to use). The shift in consumer attention is also driving a shift in business focus as corporations look at ways to engage more effectively with their customers and employees.

Definition of Rich Internet Application - Shift in Web Requirements

In order for more people to participate in creating content for the Internet, the content creation tools have to be both simpler and more interactive. Rich Internet Applications seek to erase the difference in user experience between browser-based applications (Gmail) and traditional client/server applications (Outlook). A quick comparison of Gmail versus Outlook shows that RIAs have a big usability gap, but the Internet brings the offsetting benefit of dramatically simpler application distribution.

Definition of Ajax - Shift in Web Architecture

Ajax is an architecture which makes the browser smarter and more interactive by running Javascript programs on the client. Don't tell anyone, but the old name for putting logic on the client was fat client programming. Everything old is new again and it turns out the only way to make an interactive client is to do more processing in the browser.

The following diagram shows the fundamental changes between the Web 1.0 architecture (circa 2000) and the Ajax architecture.

Where is all of this leading?

Web 2.0 is driving new application requirements and in turn creating a demand for new development tools that can meet those application requirements. Building increasingly visual and interactive web applications requires a WYSIWYG Ajax tool - something like a Microsoft Access for the Web. Flex and Silverlight, Adobe and Microsoft are providing proprietary tools for building RIA applications.

For an example of an open-source tool for building RIA applications based on Spring, Hibernate and Dojo, check out WaveMaker . Download Wavemaker to see what a visual Ajax tool looks like! Wikipedia also lists a number of other Ajax frameworks for building RIA applications.

References
A number of others have gone before me in defining these terms individually. Jonathan Schwartz recently pointed out that Java has always had RIA capabilities (but he also admits they didn't work very well until recently). Here are my personal favorites definitions:

Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Media has a good definition of what is web 2.0
Rich Internet Application. Adobe initially defined the term rich internet application. The Burton Group also has a good white paper on Ajax and RIA (registration required).
Ajax. Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path originally defined Ajax.

Finding open source software

2008-06-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

In the first day of our Open Source CEO shoot-out, Esther Schindler asked how companies should go about finding open source projects:

Let's say that a company is philosophically willing to use open source. How does it learn about the best software for the company's purposes?

Bob Zurek of EnterpriseDB notes that open source awareness is promoted by hiring open-source savvy IT people:

Businesses are gaining key knowledge about open source software by employing the next generation of young IT professionals who grew up using open source software like Linux, PHP, PostgreSQL or maybe MySQL.

Matt Aslett responded by referencing a report from the 451 group about what open source database vendors need to do to take on the commercial vendors. He also points out:

The selection process [for open source software] tips the balance of power much more in favour of the customer in that they are able to download the software and ensure it fits their needs before engaging in a commercial conversation with the vendor.

I noted that open source doesn't have to mean marketing impaired. Open source isn't an excuse for poor marketing, it is a strategy to reduce marketing and distribution costs.

Here is a simple test. If you are looking for a technical solution - for example a visual ajax tool - you should be able to type "visual ajax tool" into Google and get both open source and proprietary solutions (all about WaveMaker, naturally ;-).

Read the Silverado Rules for Open Source Success for more on how the open source business model is evolving.

Open Source CEO Shoot-Out at CIO Magazine

2008-05-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

Esther Schindler of CIO Magazine is hosting an executive online briefing on Open Source in the Enterprise. She has invited me and a number of much more famous CEOs to sound off on a variety of enterprise open source and Web 2.0 topics over the next week.

I am the open-source newcomer in the group, dragged kicking and screaming from my bad old proprietary software background as CEO of Nasdaq-listed Persistence Software into this brave new world of open source.

Despite being a newcomer, I have seen first-hand both the power and limitations of the open source model. At WaveMaker, I saw our download volumes soar by a factor of 20 in two days when we launched our open source product in February - from 50 downloads a day to over 1,000 downloads a day.

At the same time, I am now sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for the revenue from all these downloads to show up. Will people really pay for a visual development tool for Web 2.0? Will they be willing to pay enough?

In short, the life of an open source CEO is full of excitement and terror!

The other illustrious open source executives in the CEO shoot-out include:

Marten Mickos, the new Sun database czar and living proof that you can be a nice guy and a very successful open source CEO.
Rod Johnson, the CEO SpringSource and the person who saved Java from its EJB madness.
Brian Gentile, president and CEO of JasperSoft and one of the most influential early evangelists of Java.
Bob Zurek, CTO at EnterpriseDB and mastermind behind their Blades partner ecosystem.
Lila Tretikov, CIO, SugarCRM and very articulate spokesperson for the open source movement.
Fabrizio Capobianco, the CEO of Funambol and a key force behind the AGPL license.
Bob Sutor, the vice president of Standards and Open Source for the IBM Corporation.
Domas Mituzas, Wikipedia's (board member, active participant in tech projects, and senior manager at MySQL).
Jon Ferraiolo, leader of the OpenAJAX Alliance
Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Novell SUSE Evangelist.
Bernard Golden, CIO blogger about open source issues.
Dominic Sartorio, president of the Open Solutions Alliance.
Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker. In past and parallel lives, I write the keeneview blog about Web 2.0 technology, used to write a much cooler SF in Paris blog about teaching entrepreneurship in France (no that is not a contradiction in terms!) and generally worry about how we can all get along on our little pebble.
Matt Aslett, an analyst in The 451 Group's Enterprise Software group who specializes in open source software and contributes regularly to reports on the topic.
Ira Heffan, legal counsel for TopCoder, who has been involved in GPL v3 and other open source licensing discussions.
Ron Gula, Ron Gula, developer of Dragon IDS and the CEO of Tenable Network Security which produces the Nessus vulnerability scanner.

Somewhat of a cast of thousands, I will admit, but it should produce some interesting debate over the next week!

Ajax GUI Tool For Postgres – Now Easier Than Ever

2008-05-27T23:03:00.000-07:00

WaveMaker just released a new version of its open source development tool, available here, that includes out of the box support for the Postgres/EnterpriseDB database.

Before now, Postgres developers had very limited choices for building graphical front-ends to their databases. Tools like Navicat provide support for building client/server applications, however web application development requires complex hand-coding in PHP.

With this new release, WaveMaker is offering a visual development environment for Postgres that greatly reduces the amount of code required to build a rich internet application on top of Postgres. By eliminating much of the Web 2.0 learning curve, WaveMaker greatly increases the number of developers who can build Ajax applications.

This release also reaffirms WaveMaker's commitment to the EnterpriseDB Blade Program which is building a trusted ecosystem around the Postgres platform.

SaaS Platforms For ISVs - Who Wins?

2008-05-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

McKinsey & Company published a report predicting the market size for Software as a Service (SaaS) will exceed $37B market over the next 5 years. In particular, the report described the need for Independent Software Vendors to SaaS-enable their products using special-purpose SaaS development tools. Matt Asay also wrote recently that the growth of the top 60 software companies is driven by SaaS.

McKinsey claims that traditional J2EE and .NET platforms are poorly suited to building SaaS applications. According to McKinsey, this opens up a $3B market for Platform as a Service (PaaS) products from new entrants like WaveMaker, Coghead and SalesForce. From the article:

Although SaaS development platforms like SalesForce and Coghead have gotten a lot of attention, this market has so far been remarkably closed and proprietary. The Platform as a Service leader, SalesForce, has both a draconian hosting policy (host your apps and data anywhere, as long as it’s with us!) but also a proprietary language (who needs Java when you’ve got Apex!?).

Moving forward, the same trends driving open source adoption everywhere else in the industry will ultimately drive SaaS adoption of open source, particularly by ISVs whose business plan does not include a low multiple sale to their proprietary hosting provider. Future SaaS platforms will converge with traditional tools, offering on-demand development based on traditional programming languages with built-in tools for mash-up based development for basic users.

Development Problems for SaaS

SaaS is highly disruptive for existing hardware and software providers. SaaS platforms are different from traditional computing platforms like J2EE and .NET in three ways:

SaaS platforms contain new core components, such as web services APIs to integrate to other applications and usage-based billing capabilities. This disrupts existing platform providers like BEA and Microsoft.

SaaS platforms are designed for multi-tenancy, including global and tenant-specific data schemas, multi-layer administration and virtualization for scalability. This disrupts traditional ISVs like Oracle and SAP.

SaaS platform are delivered on-demand, not on premises. This threatens the business of traditional hardware providers like IBM and HP.

SaaS products need on-demand customization tools. As SalesForce has demonstrated, a complete SaaS application needs its own customization tools if it is to compete with enterprise solutions like Siebel and SAP.

SaaS products need on-demand integration capabilities. This includes ability to integrate with on-premises data (a notorious weakness of pure-cloud solutions like Force.com) as well as with on-premise and on-demand web services.

SaaS Architecture Requirements

McKinsey identified three elements of a SaaS architectures:

Development environment: an on-demand development platform for creating SaaS applications. This platform should be able to ship along with the application itself to allow customers to customize their application.

Run-time environment: an on-demand infrastructufre to deliver applications. This can be a proprietary hosting environment like SalesForce, or an open hosting environment like Amazon EC2. Ideally, the customer should be able to deploy applications on-demand or on premises depending on their security, data integration and other requirements.

Ecosystem for adding new capabilities to applications (e.g., SalesForce AppExchange). This ecosystem should also be able to access enterprise data and services located inside the enterprise firewall.

SaaS Is Make or Break for ISVs

According to McKinsey, SaaS has greatest impact on ISVs, delivering a 50-70% improvement in the level of features that can be delivered for a given investment in development and infrastructure.

For ISVs, SaaS platforms offer low upfront cost, rapid time to market (productive tools + pre-built components like billing) and high quality service delivery. In short, existing ISVs have a limited window to migrate their offerings to the SaaS platform or risk being obliterated by newcomers who get there first.

The lesson of SalesForce versus Siebel Systems is clear: existing ISVs should migrate their presentation layer to SaaS quickly while preserving their existing back end servers. Preserving existing back end logic requires a SaaS platform that supports traditional languages like Java.

Which Platform Will Win the ISV Business?

A battlefield is emerging between established mega-vendors and pure play SaaS vendors. The following factors will separate the winners from the losers in this market:

Build a robust offering: cutting edge technology, reliable, high quality.
Enable extensive customization: provide additional components that address SaaS-specific needs (e.g., authorization, billing, monitoring & management).
Monetize effectively: McKinsey identifies this as the most important success factor. The winning platform vendor will be the one which most effectively creates economic value for its ecosystems!
Drive ecosystem growth: enable partners to make money within the platform vendor’s community through collaboration, sharing of tools and best practices.

Although many of the early SaaS platforms are based on proprietary languages and tools, Gartner predicts that 90% of SaaS software will be based on open source within 2 years.

Evaluating SaaS Platforms For ISVs

Here are important criteria for ISVs to consider in evaluating SaaS platforms (sometimes called Platform as a Service, or PaaS):

Open hosting: can I move applications I build to another SaaS hosting providers? Many SaaS platforms lock the ISV into a proprietary hosting provider (e.g., SalesForce). ZDNet says that ISVs need to offer their SaaS software both on demand and on premises.
Full platform: does the SaaS platform offer a complete development solution with presentation layer, business logic, security, database and web services? Some SaaS platforms only offer part of the development stack (e.g., DabbleDB, Tibco GI)
Standard language: does the SaaS platform support development using a standard language such as Java? Many SaaS platforms are based on proprietary languages (e.g., Apex, the proprietary language for SalesForce).

Table: A Comparison of PaaS Vendors

* Proprietary language

Peter Laird also has a good SaaS platform review and Phil Wainwright’s has a good comparison of PaaS providers.

SaaS Platform Product Review - WaveMaker

WaveMaker is an open source, visual development platform for building Web 2.0 applications. The WaveMaker studio can be installed on a developer workstsation or delivered on-demand. WaveMaker creates standard Java applications based on Spring, Hibernate and Dojo that can be deployed in a SaaS or on premise architecture.

For ISVs, WaveMaker offers several compelling benefits:

WaveMaker's visual studio provides a faster and more natural way to build rich internet applications than traditional hand-coding using Java and struts
WaveMaker is completely open, making it portable across hosting providers and even enabling applications to be deployed on premise
WaveMaker includes a complete development platform based on open source standards such as Spring, Hibernate and Dojo
WaveMaker is based on the Java language, making it an ideal choice for ISVs who already develop in Java and don't want to migrate their existing server code.

WaveMaker can be downloaded here.

Summary - What ISVs Need From SaaS

Every ten years there is a dramatic shift in the development tools world: in the 80’s to client/server, in the ‘90s to three tier and now in the 00’s to SaaS. In each of these shifts, the dominant development tools providers have been supplanted by a new generation. This time around, the seismic shift is being driven by the on-demand architecture and the ISVs have the most urgent need to rebuild their solutions to remain competitive.

Over the next five years, we will see the 500 pound gorillas of the development world like Microsoft’s ASP.NET and Sun’s J2EE unseated. In their place will be new software platforms based on traditional languages that are specially designed to enable development of SaaS applications.

WaveMaker Review: a Web 2.0 Aha Moment

2008-05-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

Lewis Cunningham, a database architect for EnterpriseDB, recently posted a review of WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio that included an aha moment:

When I created my data model, it automatically turned that into a series of web services. This means that the data interface is completely separate from the logic to use that data, allowing data to be decoupled and changed at any time. You can build your UI without ever seeing your database.

Lewis has uncovered an important shift in development being driven by the Web 2.0 architecture: scaffolded development. Ruby on Rails originated the idea of scaffolding as a way to get a web application up and running quickly without having to connect all the back end pieces.

As the developer fills in the back end details for data and web service binding, the scaffolding goes away. Thus ushers in a whole new era of Web 2.0 rapid application development - in which business users can mock-up an application and iterate quickly on a user design, then hand off their prototype for IT to develop (with or without underlying dummy data).

Go ahead, download Wavemaker and get see where Web 2.0 and RAD are taking us!

Java Has The Flu

2008-05-09T14:05:00.000-07:00

I attended the JavaOne show this week, after a 4 year gap. What a difference - who knew Java could be so boring? On the other hand, this is what it feels like to go to a show for a technology that has lost half of its market share in the last 4 years (at least when measured by O'Reilly book sales - not a particularly reliable source but better than no source at all). If you don't like that source, check out Andi Gutman's recent post that Java is losing the battle for the modern web.

Let me be clear here - at WaveMaker, we have hitched our wagon to Java and hope very much that JavaOne is showing us the ghost of Java present, not the ghost of Java to come.

Trade shows in general have been eviscerated by the flood of technical information on the web. But even in the new "I'm only here for the Tchotchkes" world of conference attendees, this was a surprisingly desultory affair.

Aisle after aisle was populated almost solely by people in ugly sports shirts wearing a vacant gaze that we all reserve for particularly humiliating situations. In fact, the only booth which seemed to have any mojo was the - you guessed it - schwag booth from Sun.

This morning, I found out what was wrong. I got one of those delightful ALL CAPS emails from JavaOne informing me that we had all been the subject of a viral attack by the dreaded Norovirus. So that was it!

There is something seriously wrong, not just with JavaOne, but with Java. After 10 years, Java remains an extremely complex development environment with nothing even approaching an easy learning curve. Microsoft has gleefully filled this vacuum, driving a vast J2EE to .Net migration at the low end of the market that nobody in the Java world seems willing to acknowledge.

The Sun promise to put Java runtimes everywhere is meaningless if nobody wants to develop for those runtimes. Adobe and Microsoft are doing a far better job making their tools simple enough for mere mortals and focusing on the presentation layer.

The news at the show was that Sun's front end technology, JavaFX, was *still* not ready. The world needs Sun to stand behind one of the 200+ Ajax frameworks already out there, not create yet another one. While we're at it, why can't they just put more effort into an Ajax toolkit they have already "partnered" with, like Dojo?

Here is my prescription for curing the Java Flu:

Fight for the low end: in modern warfare, death may come from above. In technology, death comes from below. Ten years from now, who will have more power over IT - web designers or core developers? If Microsoft and Adobe win the designers today, Java developers will be the Cobol developers of tomorrow.
Make Java easier: something is wrong when very useful but also very complex code frameworks like Spring are considered the "easy" way to do Java development. Java needs to be easy enough for your mother to build her web-based phone list with it. I'm talking Hypercard/Filemaker/Access easy.
Make Java prettier: just put a bullet in JavaFX and adopt something with momentum like Dojo or Ext. If you just can't stomach Javascript, then adopt GWT.
Make Java fun: can't do this without doing the first three items. For an example of one attempt to make Java easy, check out the WaveMaker download.

Remember when people built cool web apps with Java? When was the last time you heard about a cool web app that wasn't written in Rails or PHP? OK, people still build lots of cool stuff in Java, but the love is gone and its just a day job now.

Postgres Plus Ajax = Web 2.0 Made Easy!

2008-05-07T16:50:00.000-07:00

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!

Web 2.0 Expo economics - 2,000 downloads a day trumps all

2008-05-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 Expo was last week - 10,000 people attending a trade show for a market that doesn't exist anywhere but in our own minds. As is usual when we let our imaginations run wild, every one of those attendees was looking for something different.

For example, I was on a panel session entitled "Web 2.0 and the Breathing Enterprise" - it was a good session, but darned if I know what a breathing enterprise is, any more than I know what Enterprise 2.0 is.

After the second day, our team was thrilled because we had gotten over 200 leads and given almost 100 product demonstrations in two days. During that same time period, however, we had 4,000 WaveMaker downloads and over 100 new registrations to our WaveMaker community.

I'll take 100 people who have downloaded my product and used it enough to want to be part of my community over 100 tchotchke-seekers any day!

The Case For WYSIWYG Ajax Tools

2008-04-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

[This article is based on a talk by Scott Miles, WaveMaker architect and module owner for Dojo Grid, and Steve Orvell, WaveMaker engineer and core committer for Dojo, that they gave at the Visual Ajax User Group]

Ajax developers expect too little of their tools! Why do we put up with endless code/debug cycles with our favorite Ajax library just because there is no way to visualize a UI while you are developing it?

Imagine life without Firebug. Now estimate the amount of time you spend in Firebug just trying to figure out why a particular widget didn’t render the way you wanted it too. A WYSIWYG Ajax editor takes away a great deal of needless widget layout pain.

Just as importantly, a WYSIWYG Ajax editor provides a much easier on-ramp to learning Ajax programming, opening up a much larger market opportunity. Today, the perceived difficulty of learning Ajax can drive developers often choose proprietary solutions by default.Until it is easy to build Ajax user interfaces, the ability to build rich internet applications will be restricted to only the most skilled developers. Broad adoption of Ajax requires easy-to-use, WYSIWYG Ajax tools.

Why Visualize Your UI?

Why do you want to visualize your UI while you are building it? As the client gets thicker, the interactions get more complex. As interactions get richer, the potential for wasting a lot of time coding grows. To torture a metaphor: in Ajax, a picture of your UI can save a thousand lines of code.

Alex Russell of Sitepen talked about saving ourselves from the unweb at the Visual Ajax User Group on the value of Semantic HTML for building Ajax apps. From our perspective, the semantic web may be coming, but it ain’t here yet (look here for more on the open web). In particular, HTML parsing and rendering can be slow. While other visual design tools may take different paths, the particular approach that WaveMaker chose was to use JSON (Javascript Object Notation) instead HTML/XML.

How a WYSYWYG Ajax editor works

A WYSYWYG Ajax editor is meant to make Ajax widget layout easy, without hamstringing the developer. The general things that any visual Ajax editor needs to be able to do include:

Ajax page designer: the page designer includes palettes of widgets, a WYSIWYS page editor, and property inspectors to change widget properties.

Drag and drop: developers can move widgets from the palette onto the page designer.

Visual feedback loop: developers can see how their page will look and change widgets on the fly to see the effect on the design (e.g., sizing, positioning).

Generate Ajax code: the Ajax editor generates the appropriate css, html and JavaScript to implement the design at runtime.

Import/export widgets: there is a straightforward way to create new widgets and import them into the Ajax editor to create a robust ecosystem of 3rd party widgets.

Rules for making WYSYWYG-able Widgets

Ideally, a WYSYWYG editor should be widget agnostic – it should be able to support several different Ajax widget libraries. More importantly, people who build widgets should design the widgets up front for visual tool-ability. Good widget design can reduce or even eliminate the back-end coding needed to bring a widget into a visual Ajax tool.

WaveMaker is a visual Ajax designer that can host a variety of toolkits and widgets. Our experience developing WaveMaker has enabled us to crystallize seven widget design principles that simplify the task of hosting the widgets in a visual design tool:

Portability is critical: no matter how good a tool is, developers need the flexibility to switch tools. If the output of a WYSIWYG Ajax editor can’t be edited in vi, then the proprietary lock-in may outweigh the tool’s short-term benefits. Similarly, a widget that introduces its own markup language will require its own proprietary tools (think Silverlight).

Performance counts: an Ajax editor needs to produce Ajax apps that have acceptable load times and responsiveness, making it easy, for example, to produce minified JavaScript.

Well defined dependencies: make it easy for the tool to discover and incorporate images, css and other libraries required by a widget.

Limit create only functionality: a WYSIWYG tool need to be able to change properties like sizing and positioning dynamically, not just at the time of widget creation. Having to recreate the object every time a property changes is inefficient.

Straightforward APIs: widgets should follow an API naming convention (e.g., for getting and setting attributes) that simplifies exposing properties through a visual tool.

Automatic re-rendering: Widgets should also be responsible for updating their visual representation when their properties change. One good way to do this is via property setter methods.

Make it easy to expose events: a naming convention where all event methods start with onFoo makes it easier for a tool to be smart about what events a widget can respond to and then expose them in a straightforward way.

A good example of a WYSYWYG-able Widget is FCKEdit. This is a heavy-weight widget that is completely self-contained and comes with an Ajax-friendly JavaScript integration technique. On the other hand, FCKEditor does not expose resizing hooks (we had to figure that part out on our own).

Dojo Dijits contains a whole library of WYSYWYG-able Widgets. A visual Ajax tool like Wavemaker can easily wrap Dojo widgets with Javascript “meta-data” descriptors that allows the studio to create generalized property editors. The same process can be used to make other Ajax widget libraries available within studio, such as Google Gadgets and Ext.

Tooling the Dojo grid

The trick in tooling a complex widget is to determine what behaviors to tool. The goal is to provide the right subset of features through the tool without preventing the developer from going in afterwards and creating what they need.

For example, the Dojo grid is tremendously capable. Not all these capabilities are accessible through WaveMaker, such as fixed columns, combined cells and subrows. Think about all the things you can do with Excel and how long it took for Excel to get it’s grid tooling right. In the same way, WaveMaker is exposing a subset of Dojo grid features today, and will increase the richness of those capabilities over time.

Options for representing the Dojo grid data included raw javascript, table markup and json.

An equally difficult challenge is deciding what code to generate to implement a given Dojo grid definition. In general, there are three options:

Semantic HTML: generate HTML that includes rich Dojo grid semantics

Raw Javascript: chuck HTML and define the grid in Javascript

JSON: uses an object notation instead of semantic HTML to speed parsing

The following three sections give examples of these different approaches

Semantic HTML Markup definition for a Dojo grid

The following example comes from the Dojo Nightly builds grid tests. It shows a way to use “enriched” HTML to define a Dojo Grid (a la Alex Russell). The really cool thing is that this code runs even if JavaScrip is turned off in the browser.

If you already know how to code html tables, this is an elegant approach. However, its elegance and readability is offset by the performance hit the application takes in parsing the HTML.

<table dojoType="dojox.grid.Grid"
 store="csvStore"
 query="{ Title: '*' }"
 clientSort="true"
 style="width: 800px; height: 300px;">
 <thead>
  <tr>
   <th width="300px" field="Title">Title</th>
   <th width="5em">Year</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <th colspan="2">Producer</th>
  </tr>
 </thead>
</table>

Raw Javascript definition for a Dojo grid

The following example shows setting up a Dojo grid using raw JavaScript. Although JavaScript is powerful and expressive, this essentially junks sSemantic HTML concept in favor of just getting ‘er done. is, however, confusing and difficult to read.

<script type="text/javascript">
// a grid view is a group of columns
var view1 = {
 cells: [[
  {name: 'Column 0'},  {name: 'Column 1', width: "150px"},
 ],[
  {name: 'Column 8', field: 3, colSpan: 2}
 ]]
};
</script>

Json definition for a Dojo grid:

Json (JavaScript Object Notation) represents a third way to represent grids. To see this in action, look at the widget source tab in the WaveMaker page designer. The main benefit is that it is readable and plugs easily into a visual Ajax tool JSON provides a highly readable, name/value pair approach to defining widget parameters. Best of all, it provides a format for widgets that parses and renders quickly and enables easy data interchange between the visual studio, the browser and the application server.

dataGrid1: ["turbo.DataGrid", {}, {}, {
 column: ["turbo.DataGridColumn",
  {caption: "Name", columnWidth: "50px"}, {},
 column1: ["turbo.DataGridColumn",
  {caption: "Addr", columnWidth: "100px", index: 1}, {},
}]

Summary

Until there are visual tools that simplify the task of building Ajax user interfaces, the ability to create rich internet applications will be restricted to only the most skilled developers. Broad adoption of Ajax requires easy-to-use, WYSIWYG Ajax tools. WaveMaker is an example of an open source development platform that includes a WYSIWYG Ajax editor. Try it out and let us know what you think at http://www.wavemaker.com/downloads

Really Simple Web 2.0

2008-04-23T09:26:00.000-07:00

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!

Why WaveMaker Went Mac (& Why We Ain't Going Back)

2008-04-22T21:59:00.000-07:00

A year ago, I bought a Dell desktop running Windows Vista. Last week, I finally got it working…mostly.*

This week, we are releasing WaveMaker for the Mac (OS 10.5 Leopard to be specific) and Safari. Although the Mac is a visual platform, it has always been behind on WYSIWYG development tools. With Wavemaker, the Mac is leaping back in front.

The WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio download for the mac is at http://www.wavemaker.com/downloads or just click here.

After many years of languishing in the education and design ghettos, Mac has once again become the defacto standard of leading edge techies. I attended an open source CEO conference recently where I was the only PC user at a breakout session of 10 people.

Our press release included a spiffy quote from Jean-Louis Gassé, General Partner at Allegis Capital and ex-Apple executive: "WaveMaker's Visual Ajax Studio for Mac comes at a very opportune time. Apple is gaining momentum in the Enterprise and WaveMaker gives enterprise users an easy and visual way to build Web applications."

Mac developers had their moment, back there in the days of Hypercard and Filemaker pro. Now the Mac platform is becoming a defacto standard for developers once again.

Here are some of the key reasons the entire silicon valley seems to be moving to the Mac:

Ajax platform of choice: Safari is lightning fast and leads the pack in standards-compliance. I can't remember the last time I saw any web app demoed on Internet Explorer, and if Firebug* ever gets ported to Safari, Firefox will be in trouble.
Video platform of choice: we just went through a 3 week death-march to create a new screencast for WaveMaker. Of that time, about 8 hours was spent creating content - the rest of the time was spent wrestling with the brain-dead video software we were using on the PC (Camtasia). In contrast, my 12 year old niece just created a 30 minute class presentation using i-movie. Enough said.
The Incredible shrinking desktop: with more and more compelling web applications, I find myself spending less and less time working within my Windows desktop.
The disaster that is Vista: given that I have to relearn the whole user interface to move from XP to Vista, I might as well relearn an interface that actually makes sense.
That cool backlit logo on the Mac laptop: let's face it - the knowledge that you will look good in a coffee shop probably sells more laptops these days than Ghz or RAM stats.

When I was in college I saw Steve Jobs demo the Apple Lisa in front of about 30 of us Stanford Comp Sci nerds. It is still to this day the best demo I have ever seen, despite the fact that the Lisa flamed out famously. I know that Macs will never take over the world, but it's sure nice to see them back in the race.

Then there's also the part about it just plain works! Which brings us back full circle to my Dell/Vista saga: after spending dozens of hours, many hundreds of dollars on utilities that didn't work, and a spectacular lack of help from Dell (the answer ended up being on an Intel site, having to do with the Intel Matrix storage manager, not that you really wanted to know).

Interested readers may also want to check out another good blog post on why PC developers are moving to the Mac.

*corrected - original post confusingly said Firefox, causing a great deal of what passes for glee among the trolls ;-)

Visual Ajax Webinar Thursday, April 17 at 12 PST

2008-04-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Saving Ourselves From the Unweb

2008-03-28T15:18:00.000-07:00

[This article is based on a talk by Alex Russell, the co-founder of Dojo, that he gave at the Visual Ajax User Group, with added editorializing and pontification by Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker. You can safely assume that anything insightful and true came from Alex's talk and anything smarmy and argumentative is part of Chris' "value add"]

The original use case for the web - researchers working with static documents - doesn't bear much resemblance to the multi-media, consumer-oriented web we have today. The HTML web browser infrastructure that got us this far won't get us the rest of the way.

The web has always been about the worst platform for any particular task (unless your task is to display a poorly formatted doctoral thesis). Ubiquity, searchability and combinability have always made up for the web's many weaknesses.

We are reaching a fork in the road, however, where the web's traditional strengths may be dramatically eroded by a "hollowing out" of the HTML semantics. There are basically two responses to this challenge of evolving the web. They are:

Evolve HTML = Better Semantics, Smarter Clients. Evolve the existing web by pushing browser vendors to add semantic HTML capabilities that support next generation web apps. This allows for the web to remain a collaborative community that preserves the advantages which the web has traditionally enjoyed even sa it transitions to handle new tasks.
Hollow out HTML = the "Un-web". Abandon HTML and replace it with a powerful but proprietary alternative like Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight. Let's call this the Un-web, as it carves out walled gardens which will curtail the web's traditional openness.

The web needs to evolve to support building the Rich Internet Applications that people want to use. At the same time, web tools need to evolve to be able to handle the increasing complexity of building these apps.

Example of Semantic HTML - The Dojo Grid

Web development and customer expectations have far outstripped the table management capabilities of HTML. Why do we expect so little from HTML? Is it too much to ask for capabilities like locked columns and subcolumn formatting? Is the only solution to improve the grid to break HTML by going to a proprietary solution like Silverlight?

A great example of how to evolve the web through semantic HTML is the Dojo grid, which was contributed to the Dojo project by WaveMaker engineers Scott Miles and Steve Orvell.

Here is a screenshot of a Dojo Grid:

With Dojo 1.1, we can use HTML that has additional semantics "layered on" to create a grid like this. Note that it looks a lot like normal HTML beefed up with extra attributes to encode the semantics that allow us to "say what we mean":

<SPAN DOJOTYPE=" dojox.data.CsvStore"
 JSID=" csvStore"  URL=" names.csv" >
</SPAN>

<TABLE DOJOTYPE=" dojox.grid.Grid"
 STORE=" csvStore"  QUERY=" { Title: '*' }"  CLIENTSORT=" true"
 STYLE=" width: 800px; height: 300px;" >
 <THEAD>
  <TR>
   <TH WIDTH=" 300px"  FIELD=" lastName" > Last</TH>
   <TH FIELD=" firstName" > First</TH>
  </TR>
 </THEAD>
</TABLE>

The Dojo grid also showcases a core strength of Dojo - it's disciplined architectural approach. The Dojo architecture focuses on extending HTML semantics in an layered way that still give us room for HTML to evolve to meet usage like this half-way in the future (e.g., with the HTML 5 tag). Note that we use a non-semantic tag (a span) to denote something that exposes a fundamentally new capability (data stores), but extend existing HTML semantics for grid configuration.

The result is a very clean layering of Dojo semantics on top of vanilla HTML and css. For example, even with Javascript turned off in the browser, you can still tell what the Dojo grid is supposed to be doing. We can even supply the data via an HTML table in order to get full downward-compatibility.

Replacing HTML with Javascript is enticing but dangerous. Dojo uses Javascript to extend HTML semantically rather than throwing it away. Adding semantics to HTML gives HTML the carrying capacity to support next generation of web design.

Hollowing Out HTML - The Un-Web

While parts of the web evolve, there are also web constraints that don't change, such as the latency of communication and the static application deployment environment (aka browser + plugins). There are huge restrictions in not being able to send down an execution binary along with each web app, but huge deployment efficiencies as well.

One way to overcome the limitations of HTML is to replace HTML with proprietary web technologies like Flex and Silverlight. These technologies pose the risk is that the searchable, collaborative HTML web that we know and love gets hollowed out from the inside. This effectively carves out areas of the web that are not searchable or combinable with anything that has gone before.

Save The Web - One Browser At A Time

It is up to the Ajax and open source communities to "liberate" the HTML web from the Unweb. For example, "liberating" the Dojo grid is an on-going community effort involving large amounts of goodwill, time and cash.

Rapid evolution of the HTML browser can get us to the future, but only if we get a lot more demanding of the web browser manufacturers. What we can't afford is another 6 year drought like what we got when Netscape abandoned the browser wars and Microsoft IE had the world all to itself.

The key to the web's future is real competition between the browser vendors that will force them to evolve the browser quickly. These features include:

Auto update capabilities
3-d rendering
Support for new semantics in HTML
In short, give us native ability within the browser to do what we otherwise have to do in Javascript libraries

What we know is that we have never gotten good browser enhancements and tools from the market leader. So now you know what you need to do to save the web - download and use the underdog web browser and give it all the love you can ;-)

Look How Rich and Thin We Are - The State of the RIA Market

2008-03-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

I spoke yesterday with Michael Cote of Redmonk and Ryan Stewart of Adobe (the RIA blog is here, on ZDNet here podcast is here). What follows are some of the highlights of our discussion on the state of the RIA market.

Today, there are two ways to build your first Web 2.0 application:

Buy $300 worth of O'Reilly books and kiss the next few weekends goodbye

Download WaveMaker and follow the 15 minute tutorial

For anybody but the most hardcore or masochistic tech-heads, this seems like a no-brainer decision.

If Web 2.0 is about putting more power into the hands of end users, that message hasn't hit the Ajax world yet. In general, Rich Internet Applications toolkits from Dojo to Flex are well beyond the reach of anything but the most sophisticated developers (not that I am a particular fan of Flex).

WaveMaker is focused on lowering the price of admission for Web 2.0 application development. WaveMaker provides an easy on ramp to building web applications, allowing non-expert developers to build rich internet AJAX applications

How complicated an application can you build with a visual Ajax tool? Well, we built the WaveMaker studio using WaveMaker, so you can build a very complex application indeed using visual Ajax tools!

What kinds of applications are best for a visual Ajax tool like WaveMaker? We see our community building three kinds of applications:

Rich Internet Application prototyping. Business analysts

Rapid Application Development using database driven forms generation

Face of SOA applications. Assemble rich internet applications by combining web services and data services.

WaveMaker is the PowerBuilder for Web 2.0 - we make it easy for large community of people to get benefits of rich internet applications.

As usual, the bogeyman for all this Rich Internet goodness is Microsoft. The current fragmentation of the Ajax market and related squabbling between toolkits fanboys makes Microsoft's Silverlight solution a much simpler choice for developers.

More importantly, before the introduction of WaveMaker's visual Ajax studio, Microsoft's visual studio was winning over the novice developers by default. It's time for the open source world to provide a compelling and CIO-safe alternative to Silverlight and WaveMaker is just the company to do it!

The Meteoric Theory of Applications

2008-03-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

The Meteoric Theory of Applications (to paraphrase Mary Loomis) is this:

Applications are like meteorites - they never migrate, they just land and stick.

With all the excitement over rich internet applications and Web 2.0, there is much talk of a vast migration of applications from client/server to the web (Judith Hurwitz describes when not to salvage legacy applications). While this will undoubtedly happen, it misses a much more important IT skills migration.

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?

Developers with 10+ years of experience with client/server tools have no clear way to "upskill" to building Web 2.0 apps. Consider the skills that a typical Visual Basic/Visual Studio developer would need to learn to start building an Ajax application:

New database: MySQL
New server language: Java
New application server: Spring ($26.39)
New database access framework: Hibernate
New client/server messaging layer: Json
New client language: Javascript
New client toolkit: Dojo
New styling language: css
New IDE: eclipse

No wonder there is such a shortage of Java web developers!

WaveMaker is focusing on the skills migration - how to enable non-expert developers to build Ajax applications by using visual tools (for a good review of WaveMaker as an alternative to VB, see Java at the eye of a perfect storm).

Last week, WaveMaker hit 1,000 downloads a day - seems like we hit a nerve!

Don’t be Freetarded

2008-03-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

Of the many sins that Silicon Valley practices, none are more dangerous or prevalent than the sin of smugness.

Savio Rodrigues has a good posting entitled Microsoft will prevail in the face of Freetards. His point is that Microsoft is learning from and adapting to the open-source movement, while the open-source movement is so enamored with "free" that they are not paying enough attention to the total cost of ownership from a customer's perspective.

Let's be clear - the free part of open source is a great innovation and worthy of a few minutes of self-satisfaction. The aftermath of the Y2K bubble was the erection of enormous barriers around IT to prevent tem from trying anything new that would cost the company money.

Free provides a "frictionless" entry point for new technology products into the corporation after finance barred the door. Free also enables technology self-service across the corporation, making it possible for anyone with an internet connection and a geek gene to get as wired as they wanna be.

However, free is only worth so much. If it takes me 3 hours to get my "free" open source download working, it cost me however much I or my boss thinks my time is worth x 3 = not free. Similarly, even if an open source product (for example Dojo) is technically superior in every way to Silverlight, that superiority is of no practical value if it is easy to hire experienced Silverlight developers but next to impossible to find, let alone hire, Dojo developers.

Thinking that free is the only aspect of software that matters is freetarded. This is where Microsoft can beat the open source community in general, just as its .NET platform is beating J2EE.

Let me quote from the insanely great Fake Steve Jobs blog:

Red Hat, the single company freetards always point to when they want to prove that open source can make money, has turned inept, with nothing but bluster and bravado and a deluded belief that they're actually a thorn in Microsoft's paw. Bottom line: they're the new Borland. They're 15 years old and have been publicly traded since 1999 and last year they did all of $400 million a year in sales. Microsoft does more than $1 billion a week. That's right. Red Hat's entire fiscal year is a good three days for Microsoft.

Microsoft is onto us. Time for open source software vendors to think beyond free.

Why is there Air - Bill Cosby versus Kevin Lynch

2008-02-27T09:09:00.000-08:00

I know I'm dating myself, but Bill Cosby had a pretty funny routine where a PE Teacher explains that the purpose of air is to pump up basketballs and volleyballs.

Now Adobe has launched their Air product (with a matching Kevin Lynch NY Times article, and GigaOm fan dance) to allow platform to allow browser apps to escape from their little Firefox and IE prisons and flit gaily across the desktop like "real" apps.

Now what exactly are the benefits here? According to the NY Times article:

I can click an icon on my desktop instead of a bookmark in my browser. Yawn.
I can run an application without the browser border. Snore.
I can run an application offline. Now this is cool, but hardly new, following earlier moves by Google Gears, Dojo Offline and Mozilla Prism

Excuse me, but I prefer Bill's definition of why we need air.

As I have written, Air, Flex and Silverlight are"back to the future" approaches for Rich Internet Applications that would have us believe that the future of the web lies in a proprietary animation engine (Flash) or an ancient and proprietary fat client architecture (Silverlight).

At WaveMaker, we believe open-source toolkits like Dojo are the best enterprise Ajax choice a more flexible, open-source browser choice. To be fair, we in the Ajax community still have a lot of work to do to be truly ready to take on giants like Adobe and Microsoft - but that's where the power of the community can make a difference.

Speaking of community, you can come find out more about the the Dojo toolkit at the upcoming Visual Ajax User Group meeting. On Thursday, March 20 from 12-1:30 PST, Alex Russell, one of the co-creators of Dojo, will be talking about the Zen of Dojo - how to make Dojo development effortless for beginner and expert alike. Come in person or sign up for the webinar by sending email to rsvp@visualajax.org.

WaveMaker 3.1: Make Waves, Not Code!

2008-02-22T20:59:00.000-08:00

Our engineering team just released version 3.1 of WaveMaker with lots of new goodies, including auto-forms (generate insert and update forms automatically from a database schema) custom widgets (use any Dojo widget, roll your own widget) and application templates (with custom look and feel).

We are also gaining converts to the WaveMaker motto: Make Waves, Not Code!

WaveMaker is an open-source framework for making Java web development quick and easy (kinda like a visual RoR for Java).

Peter Svensson just posted review of WaveMaker that stated:

The WaveMaker IDE has a number of very good features, listed in no particular order;
It is Web-based

It runs on its own Tomcat-server with a massive supporting act (the download is ~90MB!)

It's fully open-source under the GPL.

It uses Dojo 1.0 components, so you create your page(s) visually.

Complex components like Tree or (above mentioned) Grid can be connected to services on the server

You can create services inside the IDE; WSDL, Database Queries or custom Java code.

It generates generic WAR archives, for crying out loud!

Peter has also given us a good deal of constructive feedback on how to make Wavemaker even better. WaveMaker is democratizing Java web development, one Swedish blogger at a time ;-)

Our 3.1 release has also been picked up by Ajaxian, eBiz, AjaxWorld and TechFunk.

The Silverado Rules for Open Source Success

2008-02-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

With the success of companies like MySQL, JBoss, Cygnus and SleepyCat, open source software has introduced major changes to the way corporate IT adopts new technology. Yet open source business practices have a long way to go before the industry as a whole is fully embraced by CIOs.
At the Open Source Think Tank, a panel of ten CIOs declared that the patchwork quilt of licenses and business practices among open-source vendors is a major barrier to enterprise adoption of open source. CIOS believe that vendor standardization on a simple and commercially attractive business model will help drive broad corporate acceptance of open source software.

After attending the Open Source Think Tank held in February, 2008 at the Silverado resort, I am convinced that a best-practices model is emerging for enterprise open-source software vendors. In honor of the think tank event, I am dubbing these practices the Silverado Rules for Open Source Success:

The Silverado Rules for Open Source Success

Open-source vendors should adopt the following best practices to optimize community participation while developing a viable commercial business:
1. Fix the last mile problem
2. Optimize for community and commercial growth
3. Play by the community rules
4. Implement role-based pricing
5. Enable on-site and on-demand deployment
6. Adopt a dual license strategy based on GPL + Commercial License
Following these rules may not lead to guaranteed business success, but ignoring them may well lead to failure!

Please feel free to enter comments and criticisms on my blog.

Fix the "last mile" problem

Open Source Software (OSS) communities are outstanding at solving hard framework problems, but not so good at producing user-friendly solutions. Once the community has solved the hard problem, it tends to lose interest in solving more mundane problems like documentation, management and monitoring.

CIOs need open-source vendors to be more like commercial vendors in "putting a bow on the package. Corporate users are looking for open source products to have commercial-grade documentation, usability, installation and support.

Optimize for commercial and community growth

The first generation of open source companies were project-driven. Companies like MySQL, JBoss and SleepyCat created large communities and then struggled to evolve business models that commercialized that community. Often, they faced significant resistance from early community members, particularly on introducing more restrictive licenses that forced users to pay for things they had previously gotten for free.

The newer, second generation of open source companies is following the opposite process. Venture-backed companies like Alfresco, Mindtouch and Wavemaker started with a commercial focus and are now working to create vibrant communities.

These second generation OSS companies have a completely different set of challenges than the first generation. They have much more control over intellectual property and choice of licensing, but much more work to do on the community-building side.

Open source companies should see themselves as part of a larger supply chain, determine how to add upstream and downstream value. At WaveMaker, we are a major consumer of open source - our product is based on Spring, Hibernate, Json, Dojo.

We get value from their communities and in turn we add value to their communities by providing an open source framework for visual AJAX web development. Our goal is to broaden the overall size of all of our communities by democratizing the development web applications - essentially an open-source version of Visual Basic.

Play by the community rules

Communities are the life-blood of open source companies. Yet the process of creating a community is still more of a black art than science. Experts in community have developed a simple set of three rules for building successful community:

Set the rules early: spell out the role of the community in developing, extending and supporting the product. For example, define the ideal participants of the community, and the benefits they would expect to receive to entice them into membership in the community.
Play by the rules: once companies set the rules for the community, they should enforce those rules scrupulously, through active community management. Hell hath no fury like an open-source community member scorned!
Don't change the rules: as the business of the company evolves, there will be pressure to change how the community operates. For example, companies may decide that they want to take more support business from the community. Not a good idea - see rule #2!

Community experts also agree that the most important community building task is to create heroes within the community. The most effective way to do this is through dedicated community managers who go through a lengthy process to nurture and reward active community members.

Implement role-based pricing

I have written before that David Skok feels the success of JBoss lay in their ability to give developers a free product while charging commercial IT operations for support and management tools. CEOs of open-source enterprise software companies believe that a key element of any enterprise open-source company is realizing that there are no scalable dollars in selling to developers.

The role-based pricing approach can be summarized as follows:

Developer use open source tools for free: making a product free for developers creates a "frictionless" entry path for new technology into an organization. Small scale, "under the desktop" deployments are also free, making it easy for IT architects to prove out a technology with small pilot projects. Developers should be able to use all the development capabilities of the product without restrictions (everyone hates crippleware!)

Administrators pay for commercial support: when a project built with an open source tool is deployed into a business-critical environment, operations people will require commercial-grade support, including updates, patches and upgrades. Operations roles will also value management and monitoring capabilities that enhance the security, reliability and performance of the deployed application.

It is important to point out that role-based pricing does not mean charging administrators for the same thing that developers get for free. It means identifying services and functionality that are of particular value to administrators and charging for those add-ons.

The revenue opportunities in enterprise open source lie in selling support and value-added functionality for operations and production. Free development tools are the on-ramp to production revenue. This also ties the vendor's success to the successful deployment of the customer - the ultimate win-win for enterprise software.

Enable on-site and on-demand deployment

Moving forward, it is likely that the open source world will continue to migrate towards on-demand offerings, even for enterprise development platforms. Software as a service (SaaS) pricing is easier for business applications like Sugar CRM, but it will increasingly make sense for infrastructure software as well.

There are three drivers for this movement:

Low start-up cost for customer: with nothing to deploy on site, customer adoption is as easy as creating an online login.

Higher rate of conversion to paying customers: for vendors, SaaS customers often convert more quickly paying customers, a big improvement over the single digit conversion rates more common to traditional open-source communities.

Business model fit: subscription payments for on-demand services fit naturally with the existing open-source subscription licensing model.

Enterprise development software has traditionally been delivered on site. In the future, it is very likely that corporations will at a minimum want an option to deploy applications on-site or on demand (a feature already supported by WaveMaker Software, among others).

Adopt a dual license strategy

Over the last ten years, the open-source community has matured greatly. Although the GPL remains the most popular open source license (~70% of open source projects use GPL, according to Freshmeat), the most commonly used version was released in 1991. Much has changed since then, and to reflect these changes, the new Gnu Public License (GPL) v3 offers- among other things - greater compatibility with the Apache license while ensuring that open source contributors receive public acknowledgement for their contributions.

There are a number of other popular open source licenses, each with its strengths and drawbacks. For example, Apache allows big companies to "expropriate" the work of smaller open-source companies without even acknowledging that contribution, making many open-source startups are leary of adopting the Apache license.

In addition, traditional licenses like GPL v2 and Apache do not provide explicitly for SaaS distribution. To get SaaS companies to participate in the open source movement, the best solution today is to adopt the newer GPL v3 license with the Affero extension for SaaS usage.

The combination of GPL v3 with the Affero extension is new, but seems to have momentum. I spoke with a dozen CEOs at the Open Source Think Tank conference who indicated that they would be adopting this license over the next year.

WaveMaker Case Study

WaveMaker is an open-source framework for visual AJAX web development. WaveMaker uses drag and drop assembly to create database-driven web applications. WaveMaker applications are pure Java WAR files based on standard open-source components, including Spring, Hibernate, JSON and Dojo.

WaveMaker Software has adopted a dual-license model: open source users are free to use the GPL license; while commercial users who want support can use the subscription-based license. This allows WaveMaker faces to build a vibrant open-source community while simultaneously establishing a viable commercial business.

The WaveMaker download is available here.

Summary

For new open-source companies who do not have an existing user community, there is a great deal of flexibility in setting up the licensing model. For these companies, a dual license model along the lines pioneered by companies like MySQL, JBoss and SleepyCat is emerging as the standard business model.

I take full responsibility for any bad ideas in this document, but I also want to acknowledge the contributions of the following people who helped me evolve my thinking: Larry Augustin, Brian Gentile of Jaspersoft, Clint Oram of SugarCRM, Neelan Choksi of SpringSource and Raven Zachary of the 451 Group

Getting on the Same Team: Why CIOs Love Open Source

2008-02-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

At the Open Source Think Tank conference in Napa, one of the CIO attendees described "transparency" as a major value open source providers give him. His sense was that open source vendors are on his "team," not adversaries.

Every CIO knows that the software they are acquiring has bugs. The question is: how closely will the vendor work with me to resolve the bugs I find?

For proprietary software vendors, the incentive is to hide or minimize those bugs and pin the blame on some other vendor's product. If I am an open source software vendor, I know you have access to my source, so it does me no good to hide my warts.

The net result is that CIOs see a greater alignment of interests when they work with open source vendors.

The Keene View on Cloud Computing

The Web is the New App Store

Darwin's Cloud

Cloud Foundry is the LAMP Stack of Cloud Computing

DevOps and PaaS - Friend or Foe?

PaaS is a Cloaking layer for clouds

Where is the Killer App for PaaS?

The World Is Your Oyster: Installing and Using Cloud Foundry on Windows

Troubleshooting Problems With CloudFoundry

Death by Cloud - How Amazon is Killing Open Source Software

Cote's rule: If it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it

WaveMaker Springs To VMware

PaaS Takes Center Stage

Powerful Web 2.0 Alternative to PowerBuilder

Migrating from Microsoft to Open Cloud Tools - Mind the Gap

Citrix & WaveMaker - A Little Leverage Goes a Long Way

WaveMaker in the Warehouse

Free Alternative To Microsoft Access - WaveMaker

WaveMaker 6.1 - Cloud Development On A Roll!

CIOs Beware: Citizen Developers are on the Loose

It takes a community

WaveMaker Finds Pot of Gold On Top of Cloud

Where To Hide a Dead Horse and Other Uses For the Cloud

Cloud Computing - It's The Destination, Not The Journey

A Few Things To Be Thankful For

WaveMaker 6.0 SaaS-enables Web Apps in Minutes

Vendors Will Have To Climb Higher To Reach Clouds

Ecosystem is the Killer App for Cloud Computing

What Separates A Cloud From (water) Vapor?

A Radical Transformation - Running Chrome Inside of Internet Explorer

Making Cloud Computing Ridiculously Easy

Cloud Ready Computing

Cloud Ready Case Study - IBM's Cloud Quickstart Architecture

Why VMWare Bought SpringSource

Survey: IBM ISV Plans for SaaS Development

Another SaaS Migration Success For WaveMaker

KANA 10 - New Poster Child For Web 2.0 Self-Service

Big Hairy Severed Jugulars - and other secrets of marketing new software products

Twitter is AIM for adults

Oops, my inner nerd is showing

The Missing Link - Data Access for RIAs

Comparison of RIA Data Frameworks

Five Free Mashup Tools You Should Know About

iGoogle - Front End Mashup Screen Builder Tool

Open Kapow - Back End Mashup Service Builder

Yahoo Pipes - Back End Mashup Service Builder

IBM Mashup Center - Integrated Mashup Builder

WaveMaker Studio- Integrated Mashup Builder

WaveMaker 5 Cuts Java Web Development Time 90%

WaveMaker Weathers The Storm

Opening Up Platform as a Service - What is Open PaaS?

What Is Platform as a Service (PaaS)?

Definition of PaaS

What Makes PaaS Different?

Faux PaaS - 4 Ways To Tell If It's *Really* PaaS

Benefits of PaaS

PaaS Resources

How to create an unbelievable amount of buzz

How To Lose The Codies

Startling scientific discovery: little vegetable bits do not spontaneously dissolve in sink

Good Guys - Dropping Like Flies

Thriving Thru Recession With Head In the Clouds

IBM Gets Seriously Social with WaveMaker

Adobe Plays Catchup to WaveMaker...Again!

Complexity Kills: SOA = CORBA 2.0 = DOA

The Cloud Is Angry and Other Lessons From Gartner

WaveMaker Launches First Open-Source IDE for the Cloud

The Soul of the Web - Why Ajax Standards Matter

A good day for entrepreneurs

Open Source Marketing Metrics - From 0 to 700 Customers in One Year

Metrics since product launch (3/08)

What Drives Web visitors?

What Drives Download conversions?

What Drives Community conversions?

Converting Open Source Downloads to Customers

Summary

What is NOT Cloud Computing?

Larry Whistles Past the (Cloud) Graveyard

Why Open Source Is Euro-Chic

The Revenge of Zaphod BeebleBrox - Why 2 In a Box CEOs Never Work

Faux PaaS - 4 Ways To Tell If It's Really PaaS