Dibs on Web 2.5 - introducing Wyaworks

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Finally, I can talk about Wyaworks!

What is this mysterious project I've been aluding to for quite a while now? Put simply Wyaworks hopes to do for web development what blogs have done for publishing.

And when we say web development, we’re not talking about Google Page Creator HTML-based web development. We’re talking full SQL database driven, J2EE-compliant, dynamic web sites and web applications.

Wyaworks is unique in that it is a Widget-based, wholly-online development environment that allows users to fire up a web browser and point and click their way to the kinds of web applications that only hard-core coders might have been able to produce previously.

You might be familiar with QuickBase which was acquired by Intuit or more recently DabbleDB or Zoho Creator. All those tools allow you to simply build custom web-applications, but they all limit you to a particular look-and-feel and application framework.

Not Wyaworks and that’s what is going to make this platform so special.

The genius behind Wyaworks, is CEO and founder, John Hyde who began working on this platform before any like tool had been released including Quickbase. Much of the cool functionality that is available in new tools like DabbleDB, like the ability to import a spreadsheet and translate it into tables, has been a part of this platform for years. However, John has primarily used the WYA (Write your apps) platform as the foundation for a successful consulting business whereby he’s been able to go into companies and quickly turn around powerful web applications in dramatically, reduced timeframes than what anyone else might be able to do using traditional development tools. Days instead of months. Weeks instead of years.

The platform has already been used to build key applications for companies as large as Boeing. How many of your Web 2.0 plays can boast reference customers like that? Read John's introduction to Wyaworks on the Wyaworks blog.

What John hasn’t focused on in the past is making his platform user-friendly and intuitive enough to enable true point-and-click app building. That’s what we’re doing now as well as adapting a Widget-based approach to web development, which we believe will enable almost anyone to create custom-applications that do whatever they need them to do.

As a stake-in-the-sand, we’ve put out a product called Wyacracker, which is now open as a private beta and I’ll talk about in my next post.

I came to be involved with Wyaworks because John invited me to look at what he’d built because he’d been a reader of this blog. At first, I couldn’t see what was so special about it and I told him so, but he persisted and when I finally put my head under the bonnet I saw the magic! I’ve longed for something like this and I told him I’d love to get involved with it and I’ve been consulting to John ever since.

What really gets me excited about this if it goes where we hope it might is to really extend the read/web ideal of this Web 2.0 thing to make it Build/Rebuild. Imagine you can open up any application you like and easily customise it to suit your exact needs or integrate it into a custom-built app you’ve built to match your particular work practices. Now that’s cool. If I have to live with Web 2.0 then I’ve got dibs on this being Web 2.5.

So yes, I’m on the Kool Aid right now. But I only do so because this is a proven technology, with a real business model, genuine revenue streams that just happens to be sitting at the edge of where I think a lot of Web 2.0 attention will be directed over the next 12 months.

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