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Topic: Open Source

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ClearNova's AJAX play includes an open source runtime

Summary: Better to go open source and allow the winds of viral adoption to fill your sails and deliver you in the direction your users deem best.

Dana Gardner

By for BriefingsDirect |

I wrote about AJAX automation vendor ClearNova recently, but too soon to get in on their more recent decision to go GPL open source with the runtime element of their offerings. Heck, the stuff was already 60% open source.

The news is released today, and the code goes up in February.

ClearNova, like a lot of start-up software vendors, has bitten the bullet and recognized that the licensed proprietary software business model is too akin to paddling upstream using a pencil against a category 4 whitewater. Better to go open source and allow the winds of viral adoption to fill your sails and deliver you in the direction your users deem best.

The Workbench element of ClearNova RAD suite remains $500 per year per developer. And ClearNova is offering a strong services business alongside the product, which becomes in effect, their real growth business. It worked for JBoss.

Given the hot attention from traditional IDEs to AJAX, to provide AJAX tools functionality as an adjunct (soon integrated component?) to their exisitng tools, ClearNova should benefit from both a partnership-driven demand as well as the steep adoption curve from open source frameworks communities.

Topic: Open Source

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2 comments
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  • Runtime vs Development

    It is great that ClearNova is releasing the runtime as open source. However, currently you must buy the ThinkCAP JX Workbench in order to take advantage of the open source runtime. They mention that might change in the future.
    dbremer_z
    Reply Vote

  • ClearNova is just a Java RAD riding the AJAX tide

    Who will earn any attention from publishing a Java RAD, that category of software that has proven its lack of luster durin the years? Nobody.

    Because of this, ClearNova, who has just a Java RAD that, among others, happens to support AJAX, is getting attention. But since it uses proprietary (or at least weird) APIs, is not able to integrate with mainstream technologies like Struts or JSF (i.e. an app is either ClearNova or other, but not a mix), the IDE is weird (it is not even Eclipse) and not standalone (it needs of a separate Java IDE) and, besides, either you pay for the IDE or you have to wrestle with a bunch of unusual APIs (which is likely to be much harder than just doing AJAX by hand on top of Struts or whatever), I reckon they will just fade away.

    What I cannot understand is how such a poor offering gets attention from the media.
    jcamara
    Reply Vote
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