Just back from a break in Clifden, Connemara, summer is nearly over, the kids return to school today, back to work.
Aasleagh Falls, Co. Mayo
Counties Galway and Mayo were like the rest of the country last week, a tad wet, but unlike the developed east of the island, flooding was not a problem; a problematic drainage area is called a lake in the west.
This August has been the wettest and dullest I’ve ever experienced but at least I saw some sunshine earlier in the month thanks to Kristian Raue CEO of Jedox who kindly invited me to visit the company’s offices in Freiburg, Germany. Freiburg is very green in both senses of the word, surrounded as it is by the Black Forest and its well deserved “eco-city” status. Its also know as the warmest city in Germany, a reputation it thankfully lived up for this visitor from a rain-soaked Atlantic isle.
August morning, Freiburg im Breisgau
If Freburg left a positive impression on my mind, so too did Jedox. The overall impression is of a company which intends to use a combination of quality, vision and the judicious use of open-source to build the Jedox brand into one associated with best-of-breed products and consultancy. This vision can be seen in the evolution of Palo, from its “good enough” beginnings to its current near-best-of-breed 2.5 version, and from talking to some of those working on the product, best-of-breed status is not that far off.
Likewise, ETL-Server which is currently a Palo only “loader”, is to be further developed into a true ETL tool, while continuing to offer MOLAP-centric specialisms.
I also got a glimpse of the next version of Worksheet Server. “Wow!”, is all I can say.
Existing web based spreadsheet products are fine for simple data analysis or basic data capture purposes but cannot compete with their client-based elder cousins when serious datasmithing is required. Well, from the demo I saw of Worksheet Server in action, that’s about to change. The look and, more importantly, the feel is similar to that of traditional spreadsheets, its interface with Palo is identical to that of the existing Excel add-in, and here’s the big one, its open source! Game-changing or what?
But …
That might enable me to move a lot of my spreadsheet applications to the cloud, but what about those applications that are more suited to an MS Access type solution?
Then try out WaveMaker. It’s open source and built on industry standards, Hibernate,Spring and the Javascript Dojo framework but has the ease of GUI database development more usually associated with MS tools. The resulting applications are packaged as a WAR file which can be hosted by any standards based Java server (e.g. Tomcat or Jetty). The latest version makes developing Ajax-fronted database applications even easier with the addition of layout templates. Its existing ability to automatically bind interfaces to SOAP web services has been extended to REST web services by means of a new WSDL auto-discover tool. And Chris Keene CEO of WaveMaker also informs me that …
We are also releasing a cloud-based IDE in October with Amazon – stay tuned…
We launched in February and will be announcing our first 7 figure deal this month. We run on Mac, Linux and Windows and are currently the #1 developer download on Apple.com (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/)
Our goal is to make it easy to build rich internet applications without complex coding – kind of a MS Access for the Web.
Jedox and Wavemaker the new breed of open-source businesses…
Fantastic picture from a July post to the 
As those of you reading this from Ireland or the UK know, this has been a very very very wet summer. The most useful technology for dealing with it has been 
In future when 
