Built atop open source frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, and especially the Dojo toolkit project, the company felt it was only appropriate that their offering too should be available as open source. So alongside the enterprise commercial license, it is releasing a GPL v3 licensed version. Yup, that's the one which goes crazy with the classic copyleft concept, that was hastily drawn up in the wake of Microsoft’s hold-harmless agreement with Novell.

But back to the main program, the new version offers the kind of functionality that should look familiar to users of the old Data Window of PowerBuilder: you drag a Dojo toolkit widget over a database table, and you automatically generate a form with all the right database fields.

“If you used Dojo to get started you would have to be JavaScript guru to build JavaScript app. This is drag and drop, more like PowerBuilder and VB,” said Todd Hay, vice president of sales and marketing. In fact, the resemblance should be more than coincidental, given that venture capitalist Mitchell Kertzman, who headed Powersoft before it was acquired by Sybase (and for a while, headed Sybase itself), is on the WaveMaker board.

(By the way, for nostalgia nuts, barely a year after Sybase scooped up Powersoft, an Italian company making mobile software development tools picked the name up. How’s that for grave robbing?)

The new version has various other bells and whistles, such as addition of DB2 as a supported database target and Microsoft IE 6 as a supported browser. Over coming months, the company plans more contributions back to the Dojo community, which shouldn’t be surprising since it employs two of the major project committers.

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