Some questions regarding the Wavemaker fling

[schistad]

after playing around a bit with the wavemaker projects and widgets I have a few questions.

First and foremost, it would be really interesting to know wether this is a one-off or if this is a preview of something even more complete a bit further down the line. I realize that vCAC is probably the major effort for self-service portals at this point, but for the smaller deployments something like this makes a lot of sense.

Secondly as to the project as it stands today I'm wondering how I can use this to actually publish a specific set of workflows - all the widgets seem to be "all in" as it were, and I can't find any to just run a specific workflow.

Finally, there are hints here and there but no actual docs on how to use per-session access controls with passthrough credentials. I suspect it can be achieved, using the vCenter SSO service, but without docs that's a lot of trial&error.

Anyhow, thanks for publishing what I suspect may be a project that took a 90-degree turn when WaveMaker was sold on. It's a hell of an improvement on the pure REST integration wavemaker previously required.

[Jayden56]

Hi

Welcome to communities.

I assume this link will help you.

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/wavemaker-integration-for-vcenter-orchestrator

[schistad]

Eh?

No.

[mcfadyenj]

you might want to take a look at the perspectives fling.

I think it is more tailored to the conditions you are trying to simulate / create.

you can use this to publish workflows to an AD user group and allow execution of said workflows etc (essentially providing self service in a rather simple way)

it is however unsupported, but i think its pretty awesome regardless.

[cdecanini_ · Accepted solution]

The story behind this fling is the following : A couple of years ago it was evident the webviews / web operator / perspectives could not be maintained since relying on ancient tapestry / dojo framework that could not be updated without breaking all the compatibility.

Since vCO had is new powerful REST API and since VMware acquired Wavemaker it made sense to replace the webview functionality with WaveMaker widgets. This was researched / attempted.

Then Wavemaker was sold. The engineers working on this project did not want the existing effort to be wasted, so on their private time they did the additional steps to make it available as an opensource fling. It took a lot of time to have this complete the right way with involving the legal part.

Wavemaker is still maintained, there were already quite some efforts by our customers / partners doing custom Wavemaker integrations to vCO so this fling can be a very useful starting point and can be updated / extended since it is open source.

With that said this is a one-off project since the engineers who worked on this are now very busy working on the next releases of vCO / vCAC.

[cdecanini_]

As for the perspective fling I am not sure it works fully with recent versions of vCO.

The perspective fling was a fill the gaps solution until what should have become the web-views replacement.

[schistad]

Thanks Christoph(?), that was very enlightening

And yes, that was pretty much what I suspected - the wavemaker project had great promise, so it's a pity that it had to be stopped.

Based on this, and related posts, I'm thinking that there are fundamentally two smart strategies for vCO portals, going forward:

- Use vCAC to publish XaaS workflows. Nearly all functionality in the vCO client is supported here, which means you can expose all the dynamism to the enduser if you so wish

- Use very simple wrapper workflows that take simple string inputs and publish these in a REST-enabled portal. Credentials management may be an issue.

[cdecanini_]

VMware effort is on both offering the end user portal within vCAC with further integration between vCAC and vCO and on making anything that is available to vCAC in the REST API for other solutions including custom web portal.

Note that you can leverage the vCO inventory to search for an object and then pass this object to a workflow without writing wrappers that use strings as inputs. Also since vCO 5.1.1 you can use REST basic authentication to log in SSO.

The REST API is consumed by vSphere web client, vCAC and soon other VMware products and third party so this is a very solid base.