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Can Web 2.0 Be Safe For CIOs?

The Web-based application development tools vendor formerly known
as ActiveGrid has just relaunched itself as WaveMaker Software,
claiming that it can make Web 2.0 "CIO-Safe."

If I were a CIO, I'd find that quite patronizing: It suggests that
the CIO is just an obstacle to be overcome before users can play with
cool new Web 2.0 technologies. But perhaps that's how users
increasingly see the CIO, and enterprise IT as a whole.

WaveMaker's key sales pitch is its ability to integrate RIAs (Rich
Internet Apps) into an enterprise SOA, eliminating what it calls
"rogue IT": people setting up Web services, mashups, or
other applications that don't necessarily comply with corporate
security policies. SOA security and management vendors often warn of
similar threats, aiming to detect or block them, but the idea here is
to prevent them in the first place by giving people tools to develop
new applications safely within the fold.

The WaveMaker platform is divided into two products, both of which
ship
today
: The Visual Assembly Studio is a Web-based development
environment and Rapid Deployment Framework a server-side run-time that
handles integration with existing apps.

The design studio looks similar to some enterprise
mashup
platforms. Like them, it's intended to make application
development much easier, potentially enabling apps to be developed by
people without programming skills. The difference is that everything
the Design Studio creates is compiled into a standard .war file, able
to run on any standard Java server. WaveMaker claims to reduce
coding by up to 98%, but it's hard to know how realistic that is.

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