The WaveMaker platform allows you to build applications that are portable across cloud environments. WaveMaker’s rapid application development platform consists of two products:

• WaveMaker Studio: a visual, drag & drop development tool that runs in a browser and can be installed on a desktop or accessed via the cloud.
• WaveMaker Server: a Java framework that provides security and data management, runs in any Java server and deploys on-site or in the cloud

The WaveMaker Studio is a pretty slick drag-n-drop interface with live previews of data for bound widgets. You can consume Web Services, database schemas and Java services to automatically generate boilerplate code for you. On the frontend it generates Dojo widgets and Spring and Hibernate components for the backend. It essentially spits out a standard Spring application that will run in any standard J2EE environment.

Development features include:

• Drag & drop application assembly
• One-click database import
• One-click CRUD data forms
• One-click related data forms
• Live data preview within studio
• Single sign-on security
• Role-based access controls
• Rich entry field validation
• Built-in data grid pagination
• Auto-complete search boxes

So how does this related to Salesforce.com? They are working for a release in July that supports the Force.com platform and will run on VMforce. They can consume the Enterprise WSDL and generate a standard front and back end components that you can import into Eclipse and start customizing. Their goal is to treat Salesforce just like any other database. However they are trying to build in some platform logic such as governor and limits based up the running edition. These java apps can then be deployed to EC2 and VMforce.

If you are interested, there is a free, community edition you can get started with right away. I’m not sure of the pricing for their enterprise or cloud editions so you’ll want to check with them if they have a seat and/or runtime license before you invest too much time.

Some other interesting points from yesterday’s meeting:

• Web Fast: with WaveMaker’s visual tools, any developer can start building enterprise Java applications with minimal training.
• CIO Safe: WaveMaker creates standard Java applications, boosting developer productivity and quality without compromising flexibility.
• Cloud Ready: WaveMaker enables one-click deployment of rich internet applications to on-site or cloud hosting.
• Cuts Java learning curve 92%: College grads can build Java web apps in 2 months versus 2 years
• Reduces code 98%: Migrated .NET app with 26K lines of code to WaveMaker with 335 lines.
• Slashes maintenance 75%: Self-service for call center app eliminates 75% of maintenance costs

The SNS API is simple but also proprietary. If you have something running in JMS it shouldn’t be a big leap but you are locked into AWS. The service currently support HTTP, HTTPS, EMail and Email-JSON protocols but more are on the road map. They are also working on a point-and-click interface for the AWS Management Console.

There is no charge for the first 100,000 SNS requests per month, the first 100,000 HTTP/HTTPS pushes and the first 1,000 email deliveries. After that it’s $0.06 per 100,000 messages published, $0.06 per 100,000 HTTP message sent and $2.00 per 100,000 Email/Email-JSON notifications.

Since Force.com was not designed as a messaging platform, perhaps SNS would fit into an external integration landscape? Interesting possibilities.

The SNS documentation is available here.

The new SDK includes:

• AWS Java Library – a single jar with all of the APIs to make coding against the web services interface much easier.
• Code Samples – dozens of code examples to get you up and running quickly
• Documentation – Javadocs and reference libraries for the AWS SDK
• Eclipse Support – Use the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse to create a new project with the SDK or add it to an existing project.

As usual, Amazon have really good documentation to get you started. Check out the AWS SDK for Java site or watch the video on getting the SDK installed and up and running on Eclipse.

It’s interesting that they only support C# and not VB.NET. You would think that since there are more VB developers they could more bang for their buck by offering both languages. Perhaps VB.NET is on the roadmap.

“The AWS SDK for .NET makes it even easier for Windows developers to build .NET applications that tap into the cost-effective, scalable, and reliable AWS cloud. Using the SDK, developers will be able to build solutions for AWS infrastructure services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon SimpleDB. With the AWS SDK for .NET, developers get started in minutes with a single, downloadable package complete with Visual Studio project templates, the AWS .NET library, C# code samples, and documentation.”

The SDK requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or later only supports the following editions:

1. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition or later
2. Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
3. Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition

The presenter has a really cool site with a bunch of great tutorials and videos. If you are interested in the Amazon IaaS, you should really check out LearnAWS.

This is my favorite part of the announcement:

“Why are we so confident in the cloudsourcing approach? Because this is how we’ve run our own business from the beginning–as a serverless enterprise. We grew our business 400% last year, spent less than 2% of our revenue on IT, and have no capital tied up in IT infrastructure. We’ve experienced the benefits of running our entire business in the cloud, and work with customers every day who are taking steps in that same direction.”

You can read the rest of the announcement here.

With this feature, users that you have authorized can quickly use your Amazon EBS shared snapshots as the basis for creating their own Amazon EBS volumes. If you choose, you can also make your data available publicly to all AWS users. Because all the data is stored in the AWS cloud, users don’t have to wait for time consuming downloads, and can access it within minutes. New volumes created from existing Amazon S3 snapshots load lazily in the background. This means that once a volume is created from a snapshot, there is no need to wait for all of the data to transfer from Amazon S3 to your Amazon EBS volume before your attached instance can start accessing the volume and all of its data. If your instance accesses a piece of data which hasn’t yet been loaded, the volume will immediately download the requested data from Amazon S3, and then will continue loading the rest of the volume’s data in the background.

Some cool things you could do with snapshots include:

• Quickly and easily move data between development, testing, and production environments
• Mount a volume created from a shared snapshot at startup
• Deliver your customer’s results in a more usable format than standard spreadsheets
• Deliver your application in a more granular format
• Share entire setups for troubleshooting and support

Amazon EBS is extremely affordable. For example, a medium sized website database might be 100 GB in size and expect to average 100 I/Os per second over the course of a month. This would translate to $10 per month in storage costs (100 GB x $0.10/month), and approximately $26 per month in request costs (~2.6 million seconds/month x 100 I/O per second * $0.10 per million I/O).

1. Provides VMware with a single cloud platform with both IaaS and PaaS offerings
2. Offers enterprise Java for development in the cloud

A couple of days after this announcement, SpringSource released their road map for their enterprise Java cloud offering, SpringSource Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry will allow developers to deploy their Java appplications to the cloud using a simple and configurable web interface. The initial release rides on top of Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure but SpringSource wants to eventually provide both public and private clouds on multiple platforms.

Since this is SpringSource, the programming and deployment model is wholly built on open source technologies. The core runtime is their tc Server product (built on Apache Tomcat), they offer MySQL for a relational database and utilize Apache HTTP web server for load balancing. They also integrate Hyperic technologies for server monitoring and management. Their expectations are that most developers will be deploying Spring or Grails applications but Cloud Foundry is not limited to these technologies.

The cloud environment is fast and nimble so let’s see if VMware and SpringSource can keep up. The SpringSource blog has more details on the Foundry notice.

“We are excited to announce the limited beta of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a secure and seamless bridge between your existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables you to connect your existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend your existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include your AWS resources. Amazon VPC integrates today with Amazon EC2 compute resources, and we will integrate Amazon VPC with other AWS services in the future.”

Amazon’s VPC functionality:

• Create a Virtual Private Cloud on AWS’s scalable infrastructure, and specify its private IP address range from any block you choose.
• Divide your VPC’s private IP address range into one or more subnets in a manner convenient for managing applications and services you run in your VPC.
• Bridge together your VPC and your IT infrastructure via an encrypted VPN connection.
• Add AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, to your VPC.
• Route traffic between your VPC and the Internet over the VPN connection so that it can be examined by your existing security and networking assets before heading to the public Internet.
• Extend your existing security and management policies within your IT infrastructure to your VPC as if they were running within your infrastructure.

To get started you’ll need to not only sign up but create a VPN connection to your own network from Amazon’s datacenter. You’ll need information about your hardware such as its IP address and other networking-related info. More info on Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud is available from here.

With each release, Amazon is pushing into the space of companies like Rightscale and forcing these types of vendors reevaluate their offerings.

The installation/update is pretty painless and you can get started working against your domains after a quick little setup. The video to the left shows a good overview of the functionality.

Features for the Amazon SimpleDB plugin include:

1. Create, view, and delete domains (databases) for all of your accounts
2. Add, edit, and delete items (records) and their attributes (columns)
3. Write Select queries against your data and view, modify and export the results