WaveMaker recently announced that it is including an API Designer within its rapid application development environment. Aimed
at both professional developers and citizen developers, WaveMaker provides access to
both RAD tools and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment based on Docker containers delivered in the cloud. To find out more, I recently spoke with Samir Ghosh, CEO of WaveMaker.
VMblog: What are the top three challenges you see for enterprises in delivering new modern internal applications?
Samir Ghosh: 1) Long-tail
problem: Often, IT cannot build all of the apps that business units
need, and so business units create their own "shadow IT" to build and
run their own apps. But too often this approach creates security,
maintenance, and other problems for IT. Plus, the cloud makes it even
easier for businesses to circumvent IT and run custom apps on various
cloud-based platforms outside the firewall - and even worse, sensitive
corporate data can "escape the firewall." As a result, in many
organizations IT has been forced to remove itself as the bottleneck by
enabling self-service rapid application development (RAD) for the
business units. However, IT still needs to ensure the use of
IT-sanctioned technologies and avoid vendor lock-in. Most importantly,
resulting apps from the business units must be extendible and
maintainable by IT developers.
2) Multi-device:
With the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, wearables, and the
Internet of Things, building apps that work well on various devices is
getting more complicated than ever. What's needed is automated,
responsive app development in which apps can be written just once and
run on any device (write-once, run anywhere).
3) Implementing
Docker: SaaS companies such as Google or Netflix can invest in building
automation scripts, etc. to implement Docker for their infrastructure
where they really only need to scale a single app and app stack.
However, enterprises have different needs. For example, enterprises
have many different apps on heterogeneous stacks and they cannot invest
in manually scripting for their diverse app environment. A
Docker-architected PaaS can help with that coordination.
VMblog: What are the points in today's application development environment that led you to launch API Designer?
Ghosh: Large
centrally driven service-oriented architectures have given way to a
bottom-up API approach to app development and deployment. The further
extension of this is a trend toward leveraging a Microservices
Architecture (MSA). API Designer helps enterprises capitalize on the
benefits of MSA. With the rapid movement toward Docker
containerization, running of microservices has gotten easier.
VMblog: What three app development recommendations would you give to enterprises?
Ghosh: 1) Empower business users with a platform easy enough for non-developers to build their own apps. 2) Ensure
that technologies used by apps created with RAD tools are
enterprise-grade (e.g., Java) which are easily accepted by technology
architects and DevOps alike. And 3) Leverage Docker and complementary technologies to optimize an on-premise or hybrid infrastructure.
VMblog: What
exactly does "Enterprise Innovation" mean, and how does it help
WaveMaker differentiate itself from other app dev tool providers?
Ghosh: Lots
of attention is paid to "cost cutting" simply because it's easier to
measure costs than benefits. But what if a company's new app provides
info to its salespeople and the app gives them a 5 percent increased
competitive edge? Or what if a new app captures a new process that
reduces product recalls by 5 percent, where a single recall could cost
millions or tens of millions of dollars? Today, a bottleneck exists in
most enterprises for unleashing innovation via new modern apps.
WaveMaker's end-to-end focus on development, deployment and integration
eliminates those bottlenecks.
VMblog: Help us understand three themes you are working on as part of your product roadmap.
Ghosh: 1) Simplifying multi-device RAD for developers and non-developers. 2) Optimizing various workloads via Docker containers. And 3) Simplifying, embracing and enabling APIs and Microservices Architecture.
VMblog: What is API Designer, and what does it enable enterprises to do that they could not do before?
Ghosh: API
Designer is included inside WaveMaker's RAD Studio integrated
development environment (IDE). Literally, with clicks of the mouse,
developers can automatically publish select APIs. Previously, APIs had
to be hand-coded and required scarce resources to run. Now, this can be
done within literally minutes, if not seconds.
VMblog: What is Microservices Architecture, and how will it change the way applications are developed?
Ghosh: Microservices
Architecture is about breaking an application down into small, narrowly
focused services that can be individually scaled and enable continuous
delivery of modern apps. MSA is already changing even large
applications into smaller components.
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Once again, thanks to Samir Ghosh, CEO of WaveMaker, for taking time to speak with VMblog.com.