Software Automation, today, has been the bent of mind in almost all sectors - fast-moving consumer goods, manufacturing, banking and finance, infrastructure, telecom, and more. The post-Covid world has posed serious challenges to both humans and industries. Industries and Plants are grappling with absent migrant laborers with the social distancing exigencies. As a result, plant closures and productivity losses have led to huge losses in businesses. So much so, many businesses are considering automation of their shop floors with robots.

Given the context above, the bare minimum the IT industry can do to foster the pressing need for automation is a speedy and convenient software delivery model to the business stakeholders.

While low-code platforms like WaveMaker have been around for rapid software development, the business logic if automated with workflows further accelerates this.

WaveMaker has been farsighted in this paradigm and has capabilities for integrating with automated workflow engines already in place. A WaveMaker application can integrate with the open-source lightweight BPM product - Camunda.

An organization made up of multiple nations wanted a solution that is completely open source and not locked into any commercial software. So WaveMaker's application architecture of code generation in open source technologies combined with Camunda’s open source Engine was the clincher. This organization has a Mechanical Plant with thousands of machines, requiring the automation of inspection and assessment of maintenance Tasks for its machines.

This includes

Each of these steps typically requires the intervention, across the hierarchy, of Subject Matter Research Officers (SMRO), Subject Matter Experts (SME), and Maintenance Management Officers (MMOs).

A step like the Assessment of a task has its own workflow.

Implementing the entire business logic to such granular levels using traditional development methods would impede the speed of development, efficiency and tracking and so a lightweight Workflow Engine is a good fit. The business stakeholders for the plant chose WaveMaker which provided an easy modular implementation along with Camunda.

  1. WaveMaker provides widgets for quick development (using the drag and drop features)  of clean User Interfaces. 
  2. The Workflow Graphical representation is made using the Camunda Modeler. 
  3. The Rules or Decisions are set up in a Decision Management table in Camunda.
  4.  A REST endpoint for invoking the Camunda workflow is created and imported into WaveMaker.
  5. Java code with Spring-based REST APIs for all CRUD operations on each database entity is generated when the Maintenance Task Database (MTDB) is imported into the WaveMaker Application.  
  6. WaveMaker provides pre-processing / post-processing hooks for customizations before and after the DB Calls.
  7. The  Business Rules are externalized to Camunda decision flows so that any change in business rules does not impact the WaveMaker Low-code Application.

Here is a snippet of the Interaction Diagram at a high level.The WaveMaker Application and the Camunda Workflow can be deployed separately in different cloud instances so as to be able to scale them horizontally.

Has this happened to you? You want to build an application within weeks. You find a low-code platform that allows you to build an application with speed, using only a small team of professional developers. After building a custom application you decide to move to another platform. That’s when you realize you are “locked-in”!

The low-code platform you used generated proprietary code and it required a subscription to run applications independently. You have problems with data access and control, as the platform uses proprietary technologies, and code maintenance and access to libraries is a challenge.

Being “locked-in” is a challenge many developers, architects, and application teams face while using or moving applications in different platforms. To address this challenge and understand the extent to which you could be locked-in you need to first ask some of these questions:

Lock-In is Not Binary. It’s not Black and White.

In Gregor Hohpe’s book, The Software Architect Elevator, he talks about how modern ‘elevator architects’ are instrumental in aligning organizations and technology, reducing friction, and charting a transformation journey. When they ‘ride the elevator’ from the penthouse (where business strategy takes place) to the engine room (where technologies are implemented) they understand that the common attribute in system design like lock-in is not binary, it’s not black and white.

The attributes of a “lock-in” come in different dimensions, in the form of a platform, code, or vendor lock-in. The approach to understanding lock-in cannot be in an all-or-nothing manner. It needs to be considered across the application development and deployment lifecycle, at a broader level in terms of business / vendor, platform, and code lock-in. And while the seductive proposition of low-code is to build applications faster with leaner teams, you need to consider the different dimensions of a lock-in to unlock the real value of low-code.

The Real Value of Low-Code is How it Addresses Different
Dimensions of a Lock-In

Platform Lock-In. Can you run applications on infrastructure of your choice?

Once you build an application, the question is does the platform allow you to run applications on infrastructure of your choice, on-premise, private or cloud? How certain are you about the cost of running your applications in say a year or five years from now? To avoid being locked-in to a low-code platform, you must consider how your applications will be run in the future, on what type of infrastructure, and other aspects of accessibility, scalability, and portability.

By supporting hybrid and multi cloud app deployments, low-code platforms allow running of applications on infrastructure of your choice. With the increasing importance of delivering and deploying applications on cloud infrastructure, you can lower infra TCO by leveraging container technology. Docker containerization helps you to manage your IT app infrastructure, faster than VMs, enabling portability of workloads between cloud vendors. Low-code platforms that support cloud-native architecture, and have auto-containerization and application delivery integrated, can help you seamlessly deploy and scale applications on infrastructure of your choice.

Code Lock-In. Can the auto-generated code be extended and customized?

You could get locked-in to a platform in various ways, from proprietary application-level services to control over associated access rights. Moreover, when shifting platforms, exporting and re-importing projects is a tedious affair. With the need to copy-paste code, it makes the development process time-intensive and error-prone.

Given that the majority of the code is auto-generated by a low-code platform, the quality of code, the flexibility to extend and customize is something development teams need to be particular about. Taking a developer-centric stance, low-code platforms adopt a standards-based ‘real code-behind’ approach. This provides extending code in the future and interoperability of code changes across inbuilt editors and external IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ).

Distribute applications freely without concerns of being lock-in to vendor-specific frameworks. The low-code platform you choose must be built on an open-standards based technology stack, one that allows you to distribute applications without licensing concerns, and without a lock-in to vendor specific frameworks.

Write and extend custom code in an IDE of your choice. Another aspect of a code lock-in arises when you need to build applications on one platform and use it on a custom Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of your choice.

To optimize application lifecycle management, low-code offers a unique development experience. The IDE sync feature in low-code platforms enables you to mix-and-match custom code written in an IDE of your choice, such as Eclipse or IntelliJ, with the platform components.
To know how you can seamlessly sync project changes between our low-code development platform and the IDE of your choice, check out The Studio WorkSpace Sync Plugin. Using this plugin, you can pull the latest project changes made on the platform and ensure they are applied to the IDE code, you can push IDE changes to the platform, and synchronize projects.

Keep in mind that when switching vendors, you are also moving to a new product. You could be locked-in to a product because it becomes difficult to release new features, manage updates, make heavy customizations, configure integrations and setup proprietary extensions.

A low-code platform allows deeper customizations using custom methods and extensions accessible from frameworks, without being locked-in to a product or the platform. With access to an open-source runtime environment and libraries, a low-code app development platform uses popular frameworks used by millions of developers, making it easier to make customizations and avoid a product lock-in.

Synchronice and track code changes with version control systems. Most development teams also face the challenge of tracking and updating code when version upgrades happen. Every time a version is released, most of the times applications need to be rewritten to maintain the existing extensions and customizations built.

To synchronize changes and track code changes, low-code enterprise application software development platforms offer version control services. By using an inbuilt version control system (VCS), you can manage changes to your projects files, including source codes, documentation and web pages. Low-code platforms provide an integrated version control system where you can configure external VCSs such as Gitlab, Bitbucket, and Github.

Business or Vendor Lock-In. Is the licensing and pricing option future-proof?
A business or vendor lock-in is typically what IT teams mean when they say ‘lock-in’. This type of lock-in could happen when you are switching from one vendor to another. Commercials such as support agreements and licensing that you sign up for could get you locked-in to one vendor.
To avoid a business or vendor lock-in, begin with asking whether the pricing suits the requirements and size of your enterprise and if it is future-proof when you want to scale in the future.

Software development platforms have always had some type of proprietary nature embedded. With open source technology like low-code, this has changed. Low-code platforms take an extensible approach to application development and delivery, one that supports open source technologies. That being said, when evaluating a low-code platform, you need to be aware of not getting locked in to the ‘abstraction’. The abstraction of code extensibility, data accessibility, flexibility to customize, and freedom to track and manage components in the application development and deployment process.

How you use your technology will determine its success. Be aware of the types of lock-in.

Unlock The Real Value Of Low-Code

Let’s continue our march towards understanding Rapid Enterprise Architecture, in this blog we will cover one of the most visible aspect of modern applications being the User Interface Widgets.

User Interface Widgets play a very important role in both the User Interface Design and the User Experience of the application. Both UI Design and UX Design if done right with users in mind, can make or break application usage.

WaveMaker Platform provides a number of User Interface Widgets out of the box for developers. In case of WaveMaker, the User Interface Widgets not only help in providing beautiful UI out of the box but also are designed to increase the overall productivity of Widget Interactions. For example, by default many of the Widgets give out of box pagination, default selections, security, templates etc.

In doing so, WaveMaker UI Widgets play a critical part in enabling rapid development of applications by enabling a lot more tasks than just front end UI development.

User Interface:
Modern apps dictate both sophistication and variety in terms of out of box widgets. Different use cases dictate various forms of the widgets being used. Widgets need to take care of flexibility and advancement in both form and function. Finally every widget needs to be responsive.  WaveMaker provides all the standard HTML5 widgets from lists, grids, containers, charts, forms, panels, and all other HTML5 controls that an app requires by default in responsive form. Explore the list of widgets. 

Back-end Integrations:
In case of WaveMaker, the widgets also handle the following common functions required in a full stack application,

WaveMaker leverages the concept of Data Binding by Angular, to bind Widgets with Data (View & Model). Widgets can be configured to bind UI Elements to specific fields of the Data Model provided by Variables.

The Variables provide data integration for the widgets. Performs updates and synchronization to the actual data services in the backend. Manages client-side memory efficiently with scopes.
The Variables,

  1. Holds the actual data rendered by the widgets
  2. Data structure used for binding, with attributes and related objects
  3. API source from where the model object is obtained (DB, REST API or Java Services)
  4. Events that control the updates between widgets and actual service, vice versa

In summary, WaveMaker Widgets are highly sophisticated that not only enable creating  beautifully looking UI out of the box for Web and Mobile Apps but also due to its backend functionality they can greatly increase the productivity in developing the applications.

Head over to WaveMaker Rapid Application Development Platform page to learn more about the features and frameworks.

WaveMakers, if you have been following our journey for the last few quarters, the WaveMaker Team was intensely working on taking WaveMaker to the next level. And we are proud to announce the latest milestone in that journey - the release of WaveMaker Enterprise.

WaveMaker Enterprise is a complete software platform for rapidly developing and efficiently running enterprise custom, responsive, web apps using enterprise-grade technologies on private or public infrastructure.

Rapid application development
Rapid application development remains the keystone at WaveMaker. WaveMaker Studio provides a visual development environment, making custom enterprise app development a breeze. And with WaveMaker Enterprise, you get the latest version of WaveMaker Studio. Studio 7 is one of the most significant releases of WaveMaker in the past few years, if not ever. It includes many new features and upgrades such as:
- modern frameworks such as AngularJS and Bootstrap CSS;
- Prefabs - reusable API parts that you can drag and drop;
- brand new WYSIWYG Data Model Designer;
- Smart Layouts that automatically make all your apps mobile-ready;
- data visualization using charts, filters, and live widgets; and
- a lot more

Deployment to Docker-architected cloud
WaveMaker Enterprise also includes WaveMaker Cloud, which provides simplified Docker container management to deploy and manage your custom enterprise apps. Docker provides the basic building blocks to optimize custom app workloads but requires a well-architected Docker management platform to reap and amplify the benefits. While Docker caught a whole lot of buzz in the enterprise tech industry only recently, we have been working on Docker for well over a year now to build a platform to extract the value out of Docker. During the WaveMaker Cloud beta, we found that Docker provided us 30x the VM density, 50-100x better performance, and also 80% cost savings. And we are offering a Docker-architected cloud through the WaveMaker Enterprise platform.

Free trial at WaveMakerOnline.com
Today, as we announce the release of WaveMaker Enterprise, we are also making available a free trial version of the software at WaveMakerOnline. You can sign up with your work email for free, invite co-workers, and start creating apps for your organization.

Existing users who have helped us by trying out WaveMaker Studio and WaveMaker Cloud Beta will notice that they will be redirected to WaveMaker Online. Your projects too would be migrated to the new platform. If you have been having trouble accessing Studio and Cloud in the last few hours (Refer to the downtime announcement on Twitter, Facebook, and our Forums), it is because we were in the final sprint of a long journey.

Webinar
If you would like to know more about today's release, do join us for the webinar that starts in less than an hour from now. Register for the webinar here. Update: In case you missed it, watch the recording of the webinar here.

As always, you can contact us at info@wavemaker.com or via our Forums.

At WaveMaker, one of the things we set out to do this year is modernizing the Community platform. As you might already be aware, we have upgraded the majority of the infrastructure, platforms, and websites. We would like to thank you for your support and patience during these (down)times.

In continuing with the upgrade process, we set out to update the xWiki platform, which hosts the WaveMaker 6.x documentation. The old version of xWiki platform has memory issues which hamper performance. Hence, you might be facing intermittent documentation(Wiki) downtimes. We are upgrading the Wiki platform to XWiki 6.0.1 from XWiki 1.7.2, which was released in Feb 2009 - back when WaveMaker 5.0 was yet to be released and when there was no Instagram. So you can imagine what our Engineering and DevOps team are dealing with here. The teams are working hard to resolve these issues on priority.

The good news is that we are hoping to complete the upgrade in a day or two and we will post an update on that when we are done.

Thanks for your patience and support!

UPDATE 27 June 2014:

We are currently running 2 instances of the wiki server for maximum availability. Temporarily we will disable the export to pdf feature from the wiki as we have seen that it is adding significant load to the server. We are working on migrating to one of the newer Wiki versions, which claims to be a super stable version and will resolve the connection and memory leaks issues. We'll keep you posted on any new updates.

As you must be aware, this week there was a lot of buzz around the discovery of a major security vulnerability in Open SSL known as “heartbleed”. Most of the hosting providers, website operators, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS vendors are going through a grippling phase upgrading their servers, websites, and communicating to their users and community. Two-thirds of the Internet’s web servers are compromised.  This is possibly the worst vulnerability discovered so far, which leaves no trace of what has been compromised, by whom, and since when. Bruce Schneier the security expert, rates this vulnerability at 11 on a scale of 1-10.

We are fortunate enough to watch the action closely and none of our products are affected due to “heartbleed”, as we do not use Open SSL. Our own Load Balancer and Web Server implementations, which are bundled as part of WaveMaker Gateway use Java SSL and this is a life-saver at the moment.

We have built our own HTTPS layer, which is a closed source component using Java SSL libraries. We always believed having a closed-source security implementation, is the first step to provide enterprise-grade security and it really turned out to be true with this SSL vulnerability being unearthed.

What is vulnerability?
To give a little insight into the security loophole, this is a programmer’s error in the Open SSL implementation combined with the C language’s inherent power of providing access to any unbounded memory data. Websites and hosted software that is vulnerable to this attack would have their TLS/SSL secret keys, private keys, names, and passwords of the users exposed.

Security experts have advocated using TLS/SSL for encrypting data and secure communications for years, but this is very unfortunate to find SSL vulnerable.

Deepak Anupalli,
Head of Engineering,
WaveMaker, Inc.

Greetings WaveMaker community!

We’re proud to announce to the WaveMaker community that we are releasing a new website.  Even larger news than the new website, however, is the exciting expansion of our WaveMaker product family.

We have merged our CloudJee platform and our enterprise application server technology stack with WaveMaker to deliver an end-to-end “App Enablement Suite”.  This suite not only provides full API Management.  The Suite goes beyond other API Management solutions by helping deliver on the ultimate business objective of APIs – to get apps built -- by leveraging WaveMaker Studio’s strength at enabling a much larger audience (e.g,. citizen and user developers) to build apps.  Please check out the new WaveMaker.com for more info.

None of this changes the plans or directions we’ve stated for WaveMaker Studio – e.g., Studio will remain open source.  We will be releasing access to the Beta SaaS version of our major new release 7 shortly.  And we will continue investing in WaveMaker Studio as a strategic product in our suite.

We hope you will be as excited as we are about the game-changing potential of our Suite and the greater opportunities this provides for our partners.  Please contact us for any needs in building and managing APIs, or populating an API App Store.

Samir Ghosh
CEO – WaveMaker, Inc.

Hello WaveMaker Community,

With this post, we’d like to update you on what has kept us occupied since the New Year.

Community Platform

We are working towards modernizing our community platform. This includes migrating Community Forum from Drupal 5.7 to Drupal 6.3, upgrading WordPress to the latest version (3.8.1) by the end of March 2014.

Recently we enabled “Skip CAPTCHA” in the forum for trusted Community members. Community members will now be able to report spam posts using a new 'Report Spam' feature. We upgraded our Mail Delivery system so that user registrations and subscription emails will be delivered faster than before to your inbox.

WaveMaker 6.7

We’ve had some great feedback on our 6.7 Beta and “WaveMaker Cloud™” to create and deploy powerful Cloud-ready web apps with a single click. We would like to thank the 900+ beta developers across 70+ countries for trying WaveMaker Cloud and providing us with valuable feedback. Check out the below infographic about how the WaveMaker Cloud has gone so far. Also, WaveMaker 6.7 GA has just been released.

WaveMaker Professional Services

We have been providing WaveMaker Services like Support, Training, Low-code Application Development, and Professional Services. Recently we worked with clients to build their Test Management Systems and Asset Management Systems using WaveMaker 6.x. If interested in these services, please email us at sales@wavemaker.com.

WaveMaker offered by AWS Marketplace

We are glad to share that AWS now offers WaveMaker on its marketplace. Marketplaces such as AWS widen WaveMaker’s reach via their large customer base and simplify delivery via pre-built machine images. Here’s the WaveMaker listing on AWS Marketplace.

WaveMaker 7.0

We’ve devoted dozens of developers to work on WaveMaker 7.0. An internal preview was seen in December, even with examples of our new Prefabs, including Prefabs for posting to eBay and Facebook. In days, we will start our alpha testing and will open up beta testing to select users in April. We are striving to make sure replacing Dojo with AngularJS does not impact the user experience with the WaveMaker Studio. In fact, we hope WaveMaker 7.0 enables users to create and deploy applications faster than ever before.

With the planned revamp of the website next month, we will also unveil our expansion of the WaveMaker brand and product line. Stay tuned for more updates.

Vevek Pandian
WaveMaker Community Manager

UPDATE: 23 June 2014 -Updated WaveMaker Cloud Beta infographic and statistics.

First, thanks to everyone who has been patient with us while we assumed stewardship of WaveMaker.  I’ll admit that community communications have not been our strong suit.  However, we are increasing our communications efforts with the goal of improving in 2014.  In particular, I think we have not conveyed our commitment to WaveMaker clearly enough.  To give some perspective, we have a development team working just on WaveMaker that is larger than I believe WaveMaker has ever had and literally at least 10 times the size of VMware’s WaveMaker team.  We’ve taken on some lofty goals, big enough perhaps to worry some folks.  But we took on WaveMaker because we see big potential.  And we did make very good progress with the product last year, which I believe will poise WaveMaker and its large community of partners and customers for bigger things this year.

Community Platform

Picking up some of the operational pieces (code, website, forum, doc, download repositories, ticket tracking system, training materials, wiki, etc.) took a bit more effort than you might think.  And we are looking to modernize some of the community technologies this year.

Version 6.6

In about half a year, we completed several 6.6 releases, including milestone releases and final GA in November.  We’ve provided example apps for session and login management, and we’ve been delivering support and training for WaveMaker users.

Version 6.7

We also released the public beta of 6.7, or what we call “WaveMaker Cloud™” .  With WaveMaker Cloud, we added the second “D” to RADD (Rapid Application Development and Deployment).  We made it super simple to deploy your WaveMaker app right from Studio to the cloud with a single click.  Via the CloudJee platform, we also give you a year of free hosting (running on AWS) to try it out!   Note: 6.7 continues to be open-source, and you can still use 6.7 to develop offline just as you do with 6.6; our goal is not to lock you in, but to provide the easiest, self-service, no-ops way to build and deliver great cloud and mobile apps.  We can provide a number of optional services for hosting WaveMaker applications such as choice of cloud providers, increased resources, SLA, etc.

In a little over a month last year, WaveMaker Cloud (6.7) has had thousands of downloads with hundreds of deployed instances from over 70 countries!

If you have not yet tried it out, sign up here.

Version 7.0

With several years in the market, WaveMaker has been able to build a strong loyal following.  However, WaveMaker is also due for some modernization.  It’s our intent with our version 7 to:

a)      modernize the Studio user experience,

b)      modernize the framework to current popular technologies; this will also facilitate faster development of new features,

c)       do so without losing the power that makes WaveMaker so popular – including but not limited to back-end services integration, extensibility, browser-based, local/on-prem dev, open-source, etc.

In our July webinar, we announced our intent to replace Dojo with AngularJS as a step towards these goals.  We did not take this decision lightly; we understood that this is not a trivial undertaking.  And we understand that some, particularly those with big investments in Dojo, might be less happy with this move.  Someone even suggested that we made this decision because our skillsets lie in AngularJS, not Dojo.  Actually, we have a lot of experience with Dojo, having built a previous product on Dojo.  However, we recognize that market demand is moving in a different direction.  Just search for “Top Javascript frameworks”.  AngularJS is a front-runner on just about every list.  We’ve put dozens of engineers on this task, and I’ve already seen an internal preview.  We expect a release by Q2.

We expect the 7.0 platform to take us into the future.  Just as airlines tell parents to ensure they put their oxygen masks on first in an emergency, we find the community generally understands that WaveMaker has to be commercially viable for WaveMaker to not only survive, but thrive.  Thus, 7.0 will continue to have an open-source version, but will also have an enterprise version.  Features for the enterprise version are yet to be determined, but team development, collaboration, deeper security seem like obvious areas.

One of the features in 7.0 that I am most excited about is what we are currently calling API “Prefabs”.  These are components specific to an API that can be easily used and reused in WaveMaker apps.  A simple example might be a login Prefab for WorkDay (HR SaaS application) that can not only provide a consistent UI but can perform all the required backend authentication handshaking.  Developers and non-developers can then drag and drop this login Prefab into their WaveMaker apps.  Then, the community will be able to build and share Prefabs for various APIs and platforms.  We would like to hear from you which Prefabs you would like to see.

We will continue to support 6.6 for the foreseeable future.  Version 6.7 functionality (auto cloud deployment) will merge with 7.0.  Our goal is to provide migration tools for moving as many of 6.6 apps to 7.0 as feasible.

Special thanks to the loyal WaveMaker community and welcome to all the new users who discover WaveMaker each day and send us their praises for WaveMaker.  Together, let’s make some waves in 2014!  🙂

Best regards,
Samir Ghosh
CEO, CloudJee

The WaveMaker team is pleased to announce the release of the Beta version of WaveMaker Cloud, a free cloud hosting service for your WaveMaker applications. WaveMaker Cloud is part of the WaveMaker 6.7.0 M2 milestone release which you can download from the community build page.

As a valued contributor in the WaveMaker community, we encourage you to try WaveMaker Cloud and hope that you will let us know what you think.

In addition to the power, WaveMaker gives in rapidly building rich cloud and mobile apps, WaveMaker Cloud™ also gives you:
• A free hosting environment to deploy WaveMaker applications to the cloud
• The ability to manage deployed applications from within WaveMaker Studio
Application portability with a standard software stack: Tomcat and MySQL

We hope you enjoy WaveMaker Cloud!