OL vs WaveMaker?

[bschuhma]

Has anyone checked out Wavemaker (http://www.wavemaker.com/)? I've dabbled in OL for a couple of years and it's always been rather slow to develop in, mostly due to the architecture, rather arcane variable addressing and syntax, data scoping, and lack of an IDE. I always struggle with handling my XML datasets even though I'm pretty good with XPath. Wavemaker has an IDE and seems relatively easy. Has anyone done a feature by feature comparison of what I'd be losing by developing a SOA using Wavemaker for the UI? I envision SOAP calls to web services backed by Java and Postgres. I need all the bells/whistles of OL (drag/drop, animation, XML handling and binding, etc.), but I'd really like a simpler development environment with fewer iterations (I spend waaaayyyy too much time trying to figure out where things will be placed onscreen).

I'm not bashing OL! Wavemaker may have issues and I'm just trying to start an open, adult discussion of relative merits before I make a decision for my next project.

Thanks for your insights,

Bret

[rajubitter]

Probably an experience all of us have made with OpenLaszlo. Some things work great, the dual-runtime approach is tempting, but development speed could be better.

I've looked into Objective-J and Cappuccino framework a month ago. That's the Objective-J to JS compiler used by 280 North, mainly for their 280-Slides application (http://280slides.com/). While Cappuccino doesn't support generation of Flash/SWF applications, those guys are working on a very powerful, browser-based visual builder for their framework called Atlas:
http://intruders.tv/en-tech/francisco-tolmasky-of-280-north-on-cappuccino-and-atlas-visual-development-tools-for-creating-web-apps/
http://280atlas.com/what.php

With an Atlas like browser-based visual builder OpenLaszlo might be an interesting choice for general RIA development. Currently it's only interesting - in my eyes - if you are interested in either

a) multi-runtime features
b) development of HTML5/CSS3 based desktop like RIAs, with a SWF backup for old browser.

But that's my personal opinion. I haven't looked into Wavemaker.

Best,
Raju

[pugmaster]

I listened in on the WaveMaker online seminar and thought the demo website they created was really simplistic and cheesy. They set the bar so low that I wasn't interested in learning anything more about their product.

- Norman Klein
Author: Laszlo in Action

[bschuhma]

I played with Wavemaker a bit more and was able to create a DB CRUD page in just a few minutes - something that'd probably take a few days in OL. However, that's about all WM has to offer, AFAICT. It's just AJAX, not a real RIA, so I'd be losing the animation, sound, video, drag/drop, etc. in OL. It's too bad OL's just a pain to develop in, IMO.

Too bad we don't have a WYSIWYG GUI editor for OL. The same thing happened years ago when I wrote a lot of Tcl/Tk. Programming was very slow until someone wrote a WYSIWYG editor and you could see where things got placed based on the packing model and padding, etc.

Bret

[pugmaster]

No one has a decent WYSIWYG editor yet. Basically, the only company that has the necessary resources (money and design expertise) to pull it off is Adobe and they are the closest with their Catalyst product. But it is still several major revisions and years from being a suitable replacement for a text editor in the hands of a competent developer. Right now, Adobe is only recommending Catalyst for prototype creation. They eventually hope to address the WYSIWYG editor problem with not a single product, but a combination of Illustrator/Photoshop/Fireworks, Flash Professional Studio, Flash Catalyst and Flex Builder. This is one of the reasons they have moved towards selling Creative Suites.

But Laszlo isn't a pain to develop in. Its actually significantly simpler and more straightforward than anything else available. You clearly haven't had to suffer programming with Cairngorm yet. Now that is a framework that is truly despised by developers. And PureMVC isn't much better. Since Laszlo implicitly provides loose coupling with its architecture, you don't even have to worry about using an architectural framework.

All of the Ajax frameworks seem to be engaged in a competition to replace Perl as the ugliest language of all-time. Plus you can't even call Ajax an RIA technology as its really only concerned with HTML web page enhancements. A declarative approach is required for the demands of RIA as just writing a bunch of JavaScript functions doesn't provide enough scalability. That's the reason all of the major RIAs (Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX, ...) use a declarative approach. If you don't support declarative notation, then you aren't really a player in the game.

But this isn't to imply that Laszlo doesn't have any shortcomings, because it most definitely has those too. But if you read "Laszlo in Action", you'll see that its pretty simple and straightforward to build a relatively sophisticated RIA with Laszlo.

- Norman Klein
Author: Laszlo in Action

[rajubitter]

I disagree, there are already interesting RIA frameworks with visual builders around. Commercial ones like Tibco General Interface, http://www.tibco.com/software/rich-internet-application/general-interface/default.jsp, which have been around for years.

Take once:radix, http://sourceforge.net/projects/onceradix/ a complete browser-based rapid application development tool for building business RIAs, which can be used to build really complex applications.

Most of the technologies/frameworks are heavily influenced by the needs of the creators. Do you need skinning of components, support for standard CSS, do you target consumers (the app should run in more than 95% all of browsers), is it an intranet app which needs to run in one browser only. How d you connect to backends, is there a pre-built backend.

Check the screenshot of this once:radix app: http://sourceforge.net/dbimage.php?id=139266

once:radix supports full integration down to the PostGreSQL database, with an in-browser database designer, form builder, hundreds one of predefined scripts covering most of the standard actions you need, easy integration of any form down to the database table, etc. Compared to an OpenLaszlo app you probably only have to code 5-10% of what you'd have to do in OpenLaszo. radix runs JS on the client and server side, which means: you can use the same programming language on both ends of your system. But then, once:radix apps only run in latest versions of Firefox for now.

The Adobe approach with Catalyst targets web development and design companies where it is essential to do a lot of styling, design and customization on the UI side. Adobe doesn't expect developer-heavy teams to adopt similar workflows, they should just use Flex Builder (or Flash Builder in the future) instead, importing art assets in proprietary Adobe file formats.

But that's just my personal view...

Best,
Raju

[pugmaster]

once:radix supports full integration down to the PostGreSQL database, with an in-browser database designer, form builder, hundreds one of predefined scripts covering most of the standard actions you need, easy integration of any form down to the database table, etc. Compared to an OpenLaszlo app you probably only have to code 5-10% of what you'd have to do in OpenLaszo. radix runs JS on the client and server side, which means: you can use the same programming language on both ends of your system. But then, once:radix apps only run in latest versions of Firefox for now.


This is nothing more than a grid builder just like PowerBuilder of olde days and not a true GUI builder. The Laszlo in Action book extensively covers how to display both static and database information in either a grid or within a custom component. This topic consumes less than 20 pages. Creating a prototype back-end server is also pretty straightforward and covered in the LIA appendices for Rails and Java. So this one-trick pony isn't providing anything that can't be easily built by hand. Although, its a popular trick that sees lots of usage. But rounding up to the hour, its just as fast to hand-code this stuff and lots more flexible.

Although I agree that since its so simple to build one in Laszlo that someone should have built one already. But I would rather have the Laszlo developers spending their energy working on fundamental issues like real CSS support and scalable vector images to support the mobile phone market, then on GUI builders.

Norman Klein
Author: Laszlo in Action

[rajubitter]

It's a bit more than that, but it depends on your willingness to see that there's more to RIA than hacking a bit of code together to connect to a database.

Do I get multi-tenancy, user management, language support, complex form validation with pre-defined and custom logic, visual database designer and many more features with OpenLaszlo and LZX?

My point is: OpenLaszlo and LZX give you an interesting an powerful technology for developing client applications running in the browser. Other RIA technologies currently offer you a lot more than that, providing features like i18n, single-sign-on APIs, much more powerful handling of forms, full integration with backend systems without the need to manipulate XML documents. The RIA industry has been quickly evolving, and if you have been following the RIA trends in the past 3-4 years, maybe you get the same ass impressions as I do: OpenLaszlo has been around for a long time, much longer than other RIA technologies, but it hasn't been nearly as successful at gaining traction in the market in the past years.

I know enough large and complex OpenLaszlo applications that have been migrated to Flex and GWT for good reasons. To me, an RIA technology in 2010 has to provide more than a nice language, a multi-runtime compiler and a good component set - but everyone has his/her own needs when it comes to techologies, I guess.

- Raju

[ckeene]

Too bad we don't have a WYSIWYG GUI editor for OL. The same thing happened years ago when I wrote a lot of Tcl/Tk. Programming was very slow until someone wrote a WYSIWYG editor and you could see where things got placed based on the packing model and padding, etc.

[disclosure: I work for WaveMaker :D]

Well, what about making WaveMaker the WYSIWYG editor that OL is lacking?

There are folks in the WaveMaker community who have wrapped up Ext widgets like the editable grid so they can be dragged off the palette into a WaveMaker app. Couldn't you do the same thing with OL?

See http://dev.wavemaker.com/forums/?q=node/3430

Chris Keene
www.keeneview.com

[ckeene]

I listened in on the WaveMaker online seminar and thought the demo website they created was really simplistic and cheesy. They set the bar so low that I wasn't interested in learning anything more about their product.


[disclosure: I work for WaveMaker :rolleyes:]

@Norman - I am really sorry that you found the webinar a waste of time. In the last month alone, we have put on a series of webinars with IBM and Amazon EC2 that were attended by over 1,000 developers, most of whom found them useful.

Here are some resources that might give you a better feel for WaveMaker:

1. If you are pressed for time: 15 second "hello world" demo (http://www.wavemaker.com/_media/helloworld.gif)
2. If you want to build a multi-tenant contact management/Twitter app and deploy it to Amazon EC2 in 7 minutes click here (http://www.wavemaker.com/screencasts/entertweet/entertweet.mp4)
3. If you want an example of WaveMaker being used to build a multi-channel call center management system being used by 50 of the Fortune 100, see the Hurwitz case study of KANA 10 (http://www.wavemaker.com/pdf/WaveMaker_KANA_Case_Study.pdf)

I think it would be interesting to explore whether WaveMaker custom widgets could be created to make WaveMaker a WYSIWYG editor for OL. What do you think?