Webponder: An Innovative Cloud Service for Application Description and Provisioning

This paper describes Webponder, a technology that enables fast and agile creation of business applications without traditional programming. Specifically Webponder can be deployed as a cloud service that enables the following: Application Description, a process of defining a type of business application; Application Provisioning, a process of creating an instance of an application type and deploying it in the Cloud. Compared to traditional licensed software and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, Webponder is particularly suitable for building those community-based applications that are ad hoc and/or ever-evolving in nature, and often need fast development and agile update. Webponder provides a cost-effective alternative, in terms of cost and time-to-market, to the provisioning of these applications. In addition, Webponder is easy to be adopted and integrated with other enterprise applications or Cloud services as it is based upon open standards and provides a Web service interface.