Performance is key to the success of any application. Even though an app is feature-rich if it's not responsive to user actions it might lose its userbase. WaveMaker is a platform enables our users to develop web, mobile applications. We strive to enable top notch performance of these apps. Towards this goal, with each release, WaveMaker introduces changes aiding in optimization of generated apps in terms of code, build outputs & serving of the apps. The optimizations are made available to the customers out of the box. It requires minimal or no changes to be done by low code developers while building an app in WaveMaker, thus easing the process of building faster apps.

With working from home as a new normal, we have released yet another major update with some of the most interesting features in it. To learn about our detailed list of features and fixes, see WaveMaker Release Notes 10.5.

As a modern development team, we are adapting to the latest technology trends. If there is something you feel WaveMaker should have, do let us know here.

Now, let's jump straight to see what's new in this release!

Today it is becoming more and more common to break down a monolithic architecture into micro services, thereby you get many small APIs that work independently. In micro services architecture, a bunch of services are broken down into independent smaller services which expose standard REST APIs to interact with.

Creating and customizing the look and feel of WaveMaker applications is just a few clicks away now. We have introduced a theme building tool for changing color schemes and creating branding specs. Theme-builder brings the benefit of codeless theme creation in a few simple steps. With a built-in code editor, one can make changes and see custom styles instantly applied to the web components.

In my last blog post, we saw how the Corona Tracker app works and we discussed how to build a dashboard using WaveMaker. I recommend you to read the part-1 of the blog first. In this post, we will see how to build visualization for charts and visualization for maps.

Alongside the crisis that COVID-19 had brought to the world, there has never been so much prominence for the numbers. Almost every household, governments, businesses, media etc. are contemplating these numbers, creating models for prediction, taking measures to flatten these curves. That’s when we immediately jumped on to create an application using our own low-code platform.

Using WaveMaker, you can almost instantly create a chart or plot for visualization from any datasource. There are several API sources for COVID-19 data and with no code, using out-of-the-box widgets and charts the application has been built in just a few days.

WaveMaker platform's one-click deploy feature now enables applications to be deployed to Kubernetes clusters on Digital Ocean cloud.

You can configure the deployment topology as per your requirement and then with a single button click, WaveMaker platform's deploy feature generates the docker files needed to build images, generates the K8S YAML files needed for deployment and triggers the K8S APIs for deployment. Customer's don't have to write even a single line of K8S YAML file!!

WaveMaker offers a pre-defined set of delivery phases which enables team a progression through Demo, Stage and Live phase. This let's you thoroughly verify your apps before taking them to the live environment.

Demo phase uses WaveMaker's internal cloud. But the Stage and Live phases need to be configured to use your own AWS, Azure or GCP accounts. To this list of cloud providers to choose from, we are now adding Digital Ocean. This is the first Kubernetes based cloud provider supported by the WaveMaker Platform.

Let us introduce you to the DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster and walk you through the benefits of a Kubernetes based cloud provider and its deployments.

Deployment is a process which enables the developers to serve the apps to users. With the latest release, WaveMaker has made the discovery of deployment failures in the application fast & easy.

WaveMaker now supports integration with OpenAPIs. If you have an OpenAPI definition document for your REST APIs, it can be easily integrated with a WaveMaker app. The OpenAPI Specification, originally known as the Swagger Specification, is a specification for machine-readable interface files for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services.

Problem​

Apple deprecated UIWebView and introduced WKWebView. Starting from April 1st, 2020, Apple stopped accepting all new apps that have references to UIWebView. From December 2020, Apple will stop accepting app updates that have references to UIWebView. The current version Cordova that is used in WaveMaker, uses UIWebView by default.