Wakanda; a novel, FOSS Web apps platform

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

One of the big problems for Web application developers over the last few years is which platforms to choose. It used to be easy with only a handful of serious development and deployment Web apps solutions to choose from but now it seems like there's a new platform appearing every time you start a project and almost every single one brings something new to the table.

My focus this week is a free, open source (FOSS), high performance Web Applications platforms and also one of the coolest to appear recently: Wakanda, developed and published by 4D.

Wakanda (which is the name used by the Omaha tribe for Wakan Tanka, the "Great Spirit" of Native American mythology, as well as the name of a fictional nation in the Marvel comics universe), is completely built on JavaScript with a fast, integrated NoSQL datastore backend.

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One of the big problems for Web application developers over the last few years is which platforms to choose. It used to be easy with only a handful of serious development and deployment Web apps solutions to choose from but now it seems like there's a new platform appearing every time you start a project and almost every single one brings something new to the table.

My focus this week is a free, open source (FOSS), high performance Web Applications platforms and also one of the coolest to appear recently: Wakanda, developed and published by 4D.

Wakanda (which is the name used by the Omaha tribe for Wakan Tanka, the "Great Spirit" of Native American mythology, as well as the name of a fictional nation in the Marvel comics universe), is completely built on JavaScript with a fast, integrated NoSQL datastore backend.

The Wakanda architecture comprises three major subsystems: The high performance Wakanda server which consists of an HTTP server, a JavaScript interpreter (Wakanda uses the WebKit Squirrelfish Extreme just-in-time compiler) and a fast datastore (the company claims that, in tests, "an item can be queried from among a billion objects in a matter of milliseconds"); the client-side Wakanda Framework which provides all of the server connection and transaction management and provides the client-side user interface widgets; and Wakanda Studio, a drag and drop visual development tool.

The Wakanda server runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux; the framework on all major browsers; and Wakanda Studio is available on Windows and OS X.

The communications between the server and the client-side framework are in JSON format via a REST interface which also holds out the possibility for interfacing the Wakanda server with other client-side development systems.

One of the most interesting things about Wakanda is that all code is in JavaScript which, the company claims, means you "can develop web and mobile apps that are just as fast and attractive as native apps."

The platform's documentation is extensive and detailed with some excellent examples to get you started.

What I really like about Wakanda is that it is "clean", there's only a single language in use and the majority of the ugly details of interacting with the server and datastore are hidden by high-level constructs and it is simple to deploy.

This is one of the most impressive and novel Web applications development and deployment systems I've come across in a long time. Let me know what you're currently using and, if you test Wakanda, what you think of it.

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.