vCO - wavemaker, your cloud webservice (part I)

Many of you noticed that VMware acquired wavemaker (acquisition) in march this year. When searching for a WebView (included in vCenter Orchestrator) alternative I decided to take a look on wavemaker. I was really surprised how easy it was to start with a simple web portal as showcase for my customers. The biggest advantage in my opinion is the simple access to the SOAP based vCenter Orchestrator interface which allows you to build web portals an applications without any knowledge of a higher programming language.

With this series I want to show you three examples:

1. Get all Workflows
2. Get free DVS port-group ports
3. Clone a simple VM

After the installation of wavemaker on my MacBook Pro the Wavemaker GUI is shown in my browser (http://localhost:8094/wavemaker/). At first I have to open a new project and define the basic layout (you can customize the layout later):

I normally use the "no_theme" option because of it´s slick design. Next step is to create a WebService reference under "Service" in the main menu. Please note that you have to install the wsdl4j.jar library first.

I named my reference "vCOreference" and insert several elements in the main layout box: 2 text boxes (name/caption username and password), one button (name/caption Submit) and a datagrid below those elements. I also named the tabs as the further functionality: getAllWorkflows, getInventory and cloneVM. Please note that you have to select "password" for the password textbox to ensure the hidden input.

Now I select the "Submit" button an pick the "events" text on the right side of the navigation. Then I choose "New Service" for the "OnClick" event. This means that when the button is clicked the service variable is called.

After the selection is made wavemaker switches to the Services view and I choose the service I want to use with the new variable.

Remember the first use case I choose the "getAllWorkflows" method. After this selection I link the input variables (username/password) to the text boxes designed at the beginning of this article.

Now the variables are linked with the inputs of the SOAP call. As you might imagined I want the data grid to show the result of the "getAllWorkflows" method. This is also really simple: Just click on the data grid and click the bracket beside "data set" in the right navigation pane. In the displayed binding list just choose the first (list) parameter.

With this selection the data grid changes it´s layout into the return parameters (id, name, description) automatically. Now you can save the project and press "Run" on top of the page. After giving the credentials and pressing the "Submit" button all workflows are displayed in the data grid.

As you can see I used only 10-15 clicks to establish a SOAP connection and a small web portal. So my opinion is: "Wavemaker rocks!" This is really an alternative to the included WebViews and allows you to build web services and web portals from the scratch without any knowledge in programming languages!