Hot In '97: Good To The Last Applet

Symantec's Visual Café development tool now available

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By Rich Levin
Issue date: Jan. 6, 1997

Symantec Corp. has announced the general availability of Visual Café, a rapid application development tool for Java programmers. The Cupertino, Calif., company also is developing a professional edition of Visual Café, which adds specialized database components. It is expected to be available this month.

Analysts say Visual Café successfully blends a number of popular visual development metaphors into a single programmer's workbench. While the product looks and feels strikingly similar to Microsoft's Visual Basic, its visual technologies are significantly more advanced than most fourth-generation rapid application development (RAD) tools.

But bleeding-edge features have a price. Users say the initial release can bog down when developing complex applications. While the run-time performance is acceptable, the design-time performance is slow if developers work with several visual components at the same time, say early adopters.

An innovative live Java Virtual Machine executes Java components in real time as applications are being developed. The live-design feature virtually eliminates the age-old edit-compile-test cycle. With Visual Café, developers build applications with live data and objects, facilitating nonmodel programming, testing, and debugging.

"Incremental background compilers that speed up the compile process have been around for a long time, but I haven't seen one that lets you edit code while it's running," says tester Chuck McManis, director of system software for Freegate Corp., a Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet startup. "Even with Visual Basic 4, you have to go into run mode or go into edit mode; you can't do both. Visual Café has a 'shape it while it runs' motif. You're pushing things around, and everything's live while you're working with it," says McManis.

In a fashion similar to IBM's Visual Age for Smalltalk, real-world Visual Café applications can be built from scratch simp ly by drawing lines between Java objects and answering questions posed by a Java development wizard. Unlike other tools that use wizards or property sheets, Visual Café exploits the object-oriented nature of Java to its fullest.

Properties and methods exposed by Java objects are displayed, explained, and wired procedurally. This leveraging of object-oriented technology allows teams to produce self-documenting objects, a boon to shops trying to reorient development efforts around component-based engineering strategies.

"I have the full Borland tool suite, and Microsoft Visual C++, and I don't use any of them anymore," says McManis. "I'm moving to Java and Visual Café. With today's just-in-time compilers, the applications run as fast as they need to. And these neat RAD and object-oriented features just aren't available with the established RAD tools."

More than 100 Java components are bundled with Visual Café, providing canned and extensible support for GUI ele ments, multimedia, and database operations. A future release will add support for ActiveX controls and components, according to Symantec officials.

In addition to strong visual and component-based development technologies, Visual Café also supports bidirectional development, allowing programmers to build applications conventionally or visually. Visual Café automatically synchronizes original and generated source code.

"If you want to go under the hood and do rawboned Java, you can," says IDC's Quinn. "And that reverse-engineering stuff? They got that right, too. "

Symantec also includes a highly optimized Java just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which company officials claim produces the fastest performance benchmarks of any Java Virtual Machine or JIT compiler. However, the compiler works only with the Visual Café development platform and Netscape browsers, and can bog down when developing complex applications.

Symantec Visual Café began shipping D ec. 16 and is priced at $200. Visual Café Pro, which adds enterprise-class database support through Java Database Connectivity components, is expected to cost $500 and be available at year's end. Both products support Windows 95 and Windows NT. Symantec officials say a Macintosh version of Visual Café will be available shortly.

For more information, see http://cafe.symantec.com .

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