The Web-based application development tools vendor formerly known as ActiveGrid has just relaunched itself as WaveMaker Software, claiming that it can make Web 2.0 "CIO-Safe."

If I were a CIO, I'd find that quite patronizing: It suggests that the CIO is just an obstacle to be overcome before users can play with cool new Web 2.0 technologies. But perhaps that's how users increasingly see the CIO, and enterprise IT as a whole.

WaveMaker's key sales pitch is its ability to integrate RIAs (Rich Internet Apps) into an enterprise SOA, eliminating what it calls "rogue IT": people setting up Web services, mashups, or other applications that don't necessarily comply with corporate security policies. SOA security and management vendors often warn of similar threats, aiming to detect or block them, but the idea here is to prevent them in the first place by giving people tools to develop new applications safely within the fold.

The WaveMaker platform is divided into two products, both of which ship today: The Visual Assembly Studio is a Web-based development environment and Rapid Deployment Framework a server-side run-time that handles integration with existing apps.

The design studio looks similar to some enterprise mashup platforms. Like them, it's intended to make application development much easier, potentially enabling apps to be developed by people without programming skills. The difference is that everything the Design Studio creates is compiled into a standard .war file, able to run on any standard Java server. WaveMaker claims to reduce coding by up to 98%, but it's hard to know how realistic that is.

Like most software startups nowadays, WaveMaker uses a mixture of open source and proprietary code. The server-side Framework is built on multiple open source platforms (24, according to WaveMaker), including Spring and DoJo. However, it also includes some proprietary tools to integrate them together, so it requires a commercial license. Conversely, the Design Studio isn't open source, but WaveMaker is giving it away free (as in beer.) The applications it creates can be used without the Framework, so the company is betting that customers will prefer not to do the integration work themselves.