License Question

Submitted by Diamans on Sun, 08/11/2013 - 19:29
I am trying to figure out how the licensing of WebMaker 5 works, and still have a few questions that I hope you could answer:

[1]
Are there any differences between the "community edition" and the professional edition OTHER than the community edition being limited to 25 users? For instance in features ?

[2]
Does the "community edition" have a server included?

[3]
Why would one need the "professional edition" since it has only 1 developer as "users" where the "community edition" has 25 users?

Long story short: I am a bit confused about the licensing options. Could someone please elaborate a bit on this subject?

Thanks in advance !!

Hi There

Thank you for the note and apologies for the confusion. We have tried to provide a very flexible and transparent licencing model, to ensure WebMaker is accessible to the widest range of customers and we appreciate there might be some confusion as a result. The key distinction is between Developers and Users.

All editions of WebMaker contain two parts, a Design Studio and a Runtime Platform to run the applications you build using the Design Studio. Developers use the Design Studio to build applications and Users use the resulting applications, hosted on the Runtime Platform.

1. Currently, there are very few differences in terms of features between the community and professional editions, although there is no guarantee that all new features will form part of the community edition in future. We evaluate this for each new release based on many factors. The runtime platform for the community edition also has restrictions for use with open source databases and app servers only. Our aim for the community edition is to make it accessible to companies with smaller user numbers.

2. Yes, the community edition includes the server, actually all editions include the full server, it's just the number of users able to access the server is restricted depending on the edition.

3. The Professional Edition contains a single developer licence and a single user runtime licence, designed to test your applications. Therefore, you will normally buy a single copy of professional edition for each developer if the community edition does not meet your requirements for development. In addition, you will consider one of the runtime options.

The runtime platform to run your applications is licenced either per cpu core or per user. Either of these can be purchased as a permanent licence or on a subscription basis. This obviously provides quite a few permutations and there are some guidelines towards the bottom of the pricing information http://www.hyfinity.com/Downloads.html about the typical user numbers that may be supported by each model. This is the part the '25 users' for the community edition is referring to. Basically, you might consider a per user model for smaller user bases, moving to the per cpu core model as your user base increases or is already large.

I hope this provides a bit more context, but please let me know if we can help further. If there is anything specific or sensitive you want to share then you can send us an e-mail at support@hyfinity.com.

Kind Regards
Abdul

Thank you very much Abdul for answering that quickly and to the point. It makes many things clear to me. However, I still have one question remaining and that is with regards to the server in the community version.

You state:
The runtime platform for the community edition also has restrictions for use with open source databases and app servers only.


What does this mean Abdul? "Open Source Databases" I get. But what is meant by the app servers restriction? That I can only use the community edition with for instance TomCat / IIS or Apache (open source web servers) ? Then I don't understand why the appserver is included in the community version?

For any completely new customers, it may be difficult to get an idea of how the complete system and it's licensing options work together. You might think about putting a high level overview document or video together to explain this in a more quick approach.

I must say I very much like what I am seeing looking at your product, and (together with some colleague independent developers located in different countries) am seriously thinking about starting with your platform.

It's great to hear you are considering WebMaker and thank you for the suggestions for new customers - these are noted.

WebMaker contains a runtime platform, which is a Java webapp that needs a standard J2EE container to run. Therefore, you need to host the WebMaker community edition platform within an open source J2EE container. By default it's shipped with Tomcat. If you intend to host the platform on commercial containers such as Webspere then you have to purchase the Enterprise Server.

[A bit of technical info below since you are on the support forum :) ]
When you click 'Run Test', WebMaker will deploy to this location:
{install location}\hyfinity\runtime\tomcat-runtime\webapps\...

When you are ready to publish you can define your own target environments. When you select the .WAR file option, WebMaker will package the runtime platform, together with your application. You can then simply drop the archive file to your target J2EE container. You can also publish directly to the target container without creating the .WAR file if you need to.

I hope that makes sense.

Regards
Abdul

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