News

WaveMaker Launches Intra-Enterprise DevPortal

• By John K. Waters
• March 27, 2015

WaveMaker Inc. launched a developer portal designed to "foster an API focus in the development of apps that can be repurposed and shared interdepartmentally within the enterprise." In other words, the aptly named WaveMaker DevPortal lets developers discover and consume REST APIs exposed by other apps within their own organizations.

The Application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) provider is best known for its WaveMaker Studio RAADD (Rapid API Application Development and Deployment) cloud-and-mobile-app development environment. Since that product was launched in 2005, it has been downloaded more than 2 million times by a community of more than 30,000 users, the company said. According to WaveMaker CEO Samir Ghosh, the new offering is a logical extension of the IDE's capabilities.

"Traditionally API design and app development are somewhat disconnected in the enterprise," Ghosh told ADTmag. "We're removing some the issues in the development of APIs by allowing you to share them within your organization. With DevPortal, you now have a shared environment where APIs are published to a directory. Anyone in the company, depending on the rights granted, can see them and use them in their own applications. The DevPortal really rounds out our vision of API-led app development."

That vision has developers using the WaveMaker Studio tools, which employ an API-driven approach, Ghosh said. REST APIs are generated automatically for an app and published to the WaveMaker Enterprise Developer Network (EDN), an online collaboration environment. Those APIs are available for modification and consumption through the API Designer component of Studio, and now easily published to the DevPortal.

The DevPortal also generates Web-based documentation for the APIs, and it allows developers to honor endpoint contracts by ensuring backward compatibility and zero-downtime version deployment, the company said.

"This is a way of creating better architected applications by leveraging services and reuse," Ghosh said. "If you can reuse existing services, you don't have to write that code over and over again. And the DevPortal allows developers to establish REST API boundaries quickly, which eases the deployment of apps based on a microservices architecture."

Pieces of the DevPortal have been in beta for several months. A trial version will be available online soon, Ghosh said.

Mountain View, Calif.-based WaveMaker is a subsidiary of Pramati Technologies Private Limited, a software engineering company based in India. The company was acquired by VMware Inc. in 2011 and then bought by Pramati in 2013 "to grow and enhance Pramati's cloud-based Java development capabilities," the company said at the time.