WaveMaker Studio is an open source project that enables web application development by non-professional developers. WaveMaker is not a programming language; instead, it is a tool that makes it easy to build web applications in leading languages. As you visually assemble components in your browser, WaveMaker constructs an industrial strength application using leading open source libraries, such as the Spring Framework and the Dojo Toolkit. The result is a standards-based web application that can be built by a beginner and maintained by an expert.

We'll prepare for our journey by setting up our workspace. First, we will need to get ourselves a copy of WaveMaker Studio and the required examples. This book includes eight example applications. Viewing the sample projects in the Studio, as a developer, is a great way to better understand how these applications were built. With the example source code in hand, we will take one of the example applications out for a spin. This will provide us with a tangible understanding of our destination and a look at what we are able to create using WaveMaker. We'll end our introduction with a quick look under the covers of the sample. By examining the sample from a developer's point of view, we'll get our first feel for how things work under the pretty user interface.

In this chapter, we will: