VMware has announced the acquisition of WaveMaker, a widely used graphical tool that enables non-expert developers to build web applications quickly.  While WaveMaker is already part of the Spring ecosystem, it will now become an integral part of the Spring family and VMware’s cloud strategy.  WaveMaker is an open source solution with a growing community and a quickly growing user base with more than 135,000 downloads per month over the last 12 months. 

This acquisition furthers VMware’s cloud application platform strategy by empowering additional developers to build and run modern applications that share information with underlying infrastructure to maximize performance, quality of service and infrastructure utilization. 

So what's next?  The companies announced some of the highlights that you can expect:

• Close alignment with Spring Roo will ensure consistent architecture between Spring Roo and WaveMaker applications and enable developers to work on WaveMaker applications at three levels: in traditional code-only style; in code-oriented fashion turbo-charged by Spring Roo; and with the WaveMaker graphical environment.  This will be a uniquely compelling set of choices.
• WaveMaker as a service will fit naturally with our cloud computing strategy, including Code2Cloud.
• Currently WaveMaker builds applications using as inputs database tables and web service endpoints. We have lots more Spring goodness to work with. We will enrich this functionality through exposing many other features of Spring, such as Spring Integration and Spring Social endpoints, along with other cloud services.

The company also said this is going to be a big year for Spring and VMware cloud-related technologies.  With the WaveMaker acquisition, they claim they will be able to bring the impact of their new technologies to an even larger audience.

All of WaveMaker’s staff are expected to be joining VMware.