Is Warewolf a Service Bus?

For a long time we have really battled to put Warewolf into a neat box. It is a powerful, unique and multi-faceted system that we’ve never been able to categorise. It’s been a massive frustration as a marketer when I’ve tried to communicate this “thing”.

 

The idea behind Warewolf started as a frustration with how the current software development environment is. It can be overly complex where the developer is unable to see the wood for the trees, buried in lines of code. Business and IT cannot see eye to eye because they don’t speak the same language, a massive impediment to both parties who should be working together. Developers are frustrated with building the same capture form over and over where their skills could be better utilised without all the noise.

The idea is to remove the unnecessary and mundane from software development in a way that business and IT can work together to take the company forward in a meaningful way. Make common things easy to reuse with pre-built components. Empower developers by freeing them up to work on the cool stuff and the big picture.

 

So with all this in mind the journey began to build a system that could deliver on this. In our early days we were convinced that we could provide “SOA in seconds” with this application. In fact, when we were very much in our alpha (pre-beta) stage, we started a campaign to find a closed group of alpha users to test, feedback and ultimately become our core of first-ever users. While we did manage to get over 150 subscribers, there are very few who still actively use the application today, and very few gave us feedback. They were not seeing what we were seeing. Ouch.

 

We then took a strategy of testing a multitude of different landing pages to see which one converted the most visitors into hard-core users. We had, and still do have, pages that highlight Warewolf as a fast application development tool, an easy integration tool, an API management tool, a BPM platform, something with awesome re-usable components, a Microservices Architecture platform, a Rapid Prototyping platform and even something that visually represents business logic.

 

We tweaked, we optimised, we ran focus groups, but somehow there was still something missing. While Warewolf does do all of these things, and very well, there was nothing tying it all together. The idea was not easy to explain to anyone in a single sentence. Enter Service Bus. Here was a concept that finally allowed the penny to drop. With one simple term all of Warewolf was described, and neatly defined into a comfy, left-brain category. Hooray!

 

As a Service Bus Warewolf is unique in the features it has and how it works. It is lightweight yet still gives you the power to easily integrate into other systems. It offers secure messaging and is easy to maintain with its visual IDE. It is uncomplicated, making it easy to learn and simple to use. Because it’s visual, and uses concepts of flow-based programming, it’s code language agnostic – making it usable and accessible to any developer.

 

As exciting as it is, we are reminded how far we still need to go. Big, key features still need to be developed before the application is truly scalable and highly performant. There is still a lot to do on the user experience side to make it more intuitive and obvious to use. At least, though, we know that all of the awesome features  we are developing hang so well off this Service Bus we call Warewolf. Secure, easy and coding language agnostic.