Developing with the popular AJAX technique for Web applications is the focus of product releases Monday from both WaveMaker and Genuitec.

WaveMaker released Monday Visual Ajax Studio 4.0, an open source, browser-based development tool intended to provide a point-and-click paradigm for building Web applications.

"The most significant changes are that we've kind of taken a step forward in the amount of functionality that you can deliver in a very short period of time," WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene said. The company, formerly called ActiveGrid, seeks to provide a PowerBuilder-like visual environment for building AJAX applications on the Web, Keene said.

"You can drag and drop widgets and then connect them visually to back-end data or back-end Web services," Keene said.

Developers can construct AJAX-based mashups with the Live Forms capability in version 4.0. Also featured is a skin for the AJAX Dojo toolkit that provides a Mac-like look to Web applications.

The new product eliminates "forms hell" by enabling a developer to build a form to create, read, update, and delete database information with a single click, WaveMaker said. A built-in "oops" button can undo page designer changes. Auto-discovery of Web services is featured to hide complexity, the company said.

WaveMaker MVC and binding interfaces resemble Apple's Xcode development environment. Also, developers can install either the PostgreSQL open source database or the EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus distribution as part of a WaveMaker installation.

Visual Ajax Studio is available either through a commercial license or the GNU Affero General Public License. Applications developed using WaveMaker deploy as standard Java WAR (Web application archive) files to Java servers. The commercial product, featuring role-based security, costs US$5,000 per server per year. The open source license, featuring customer support, costs US$599 per year per developer.

WaveMaker sees itself competing with Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight but argues that its leveraging of prominent open source projects such as Hibernate and Spring is an advantage.

Genuitec announced availability of the first milestone release of MyEclipse 7.0 Blue Edition IDE, offering IBM WebSphere developers AJAX tooling, reporting, and Eclipse 3.4 platform support. Eclipse 3.4 was featured in the "Ganymede" release of Eclipse technologies in June.

MyEclipse 7.0 Blue Edition also supports the Maven 2 build manager, Enterprise JavaBeans and Spring IDE for MyEclipse. Users can acquire Blue Edition via the Genuitec's Pulse software profiling and Eclipse plug-in management service.

Genuitec also released MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 7.0 milestone 1, the company's general purpose IDE based on Eclipse. Also offered through Pulse, it features AJAX tooling for Java Enterprise Edition and application lifecycle management capabilities for Eclipse 3.4.

General availability for the two Genuitec products is expected in October.