Startup Of The Week: WaveMaker Tries To Simplify Web AppsStartup Of The Week: WaveMaker Tries To Simplify Web Apps

Deploying Web 2.0 applications is a priority for many businesses, but building them is beyond the expertise of some developers. WaveMaker aims to make Web app development easier by combining some of the tools of the trade--Spring, Dojo, Hibernate, and other open source technologies--in an environment that's easier to use. ----John Foley WAVEMAKER SOFTWARE HEADQUARTERS: San Francisco

PRODUCTS: WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio and Rapid Deployment Framework for Web applications

PRINCIPAL: Chris Keene, CEO and chairman

INVESTORS: Allegis Capital, Worldview Technology Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners

EARLY CUSTOMERS: Macys.com, National City Bank

THE CHALLENGE

There's no shortage of development environments to choose from. WaveMaker's opportunity, and its challenge, is in convincing IT departments that WaveMaker Studio and Framework provide a better way of working. The company emphasizes speed of development and IT governance, or what it calls "Web fast" and "CIO safe," respectively. BRAIN TRUST Keene joined WaveMaker (then called ActiveGrid) in January 2007. He was previously co-founder and CEO of Persistence Software, acquired in 2001 by Progress Software. He blogs at KeeneView.com. VP of marketing Todd Hay hails from Adobe, while VP of engineering Derek Henninger was a co-founder of Persistence Software. Board member Mitchell Kertzman, as founder and CEO of Powersoft, helped sway an earlier generation of programmers with Powersoft's popular PowerBuilder tools. BUSINESS MODEL As a commercial open source company, WaveMaker's software is available under two licensing options: a no-charge GPL or an enterprise license with support for $10,000 per Java virtual machine. WHAT'S NEW WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio 3.1.1 was released two weeks ago. New features include automatic form generation, making it easier to convert client-server apps into Web apps that treat forms as reusable widgets. The ability to register for developer communities has been built in. Other improvements include support for IBM's DB2 database and Internet Explorer 6. Studio 3.1.1 and WaveMaker Rapid Deployment Framework 3.1.1 are now available under the open source Affero GPL 3 license. TIMELINE