Intranet Journal
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Review: Visual Café 4 Enterprise Edition

As a product from Symantec Visual Café was for years one of the best Java development environments. Now it's in the fold of WebGain, Inc., and that's turning out to be a good thing, because Visual Café has become more accurately aimed at enterprise level, the Web and intranet applications.

Visual Café has been enhanced not only in its Java (more Java 2 and EJB support) but has also become the center of a much improved distributed debugging, application server connections (BEA WebLogic), and WebGain Studio (which includes additional enterprise level support products).

At the moment Visual Café (and WebGain Studio) are Windows based development environments, although there should be a Linux/Unix version shortly. Installation and configuration is quick and less difficult than similar packages from IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. On the whole Visual Café spends less time with the complicated to configure distributed application elements and more on the nuts and bolts of Java programming.

While the user interface (IDE) of Visual Café hasn't changed much, it's done more than keep up with the times (Java 2) by adding wizards and other devices to help create Enterprise Java Beans (EJB 1.1 or 1.0). When I fired up this environment to produce a distributed application test, I found the familiar ease of use and the usual selection of Swing and Bean components. Creating your own Beans can be as structured or freewheeling as you wish. Likewise, creating a servlet was well documented and supported by wizards or you could fashion one on your own.

Like Borland's Jbuilder, Visual Café supports two-way development, meaning you can use either the visual IDE to construct a program or hand code directly into the project files; either way the compiler recognizes the changes and compiles accordingly. The built-in Java editor makes it easy to do manual coding, if that's your mode. If not, the many wizards can do much of the job.

Data handling in Visual Café is solid, though not as easily employed as in Borland JBuilder. (The StructureBuilder module in WebGain studio is a big help in this regard.) There is full support for JDBC with database wizards and components.

Out in the middle tier and deployment end of Web applications, WebGain is tightly integrated with the BEA WebLogic Server. Although other application servers can be used, you wouldn't want to, since the integration with WebLogic Server provides crucial remote debugging and hot deployment features. Using WebLogic Server shouldn't cause any concern, of course, it's one of the leaders, but it's important to understand that with WebGain this is the direction you should probably go.

Programmers and programming shops have different takes on the importance and practice of debugging. Those who are really serious soon discover that Web applications are difficult to debug. In this area, Visual Café provides just about the best debugging in the business. It's always been strong, however, this version has a new debugging engine that works better with distributed apps because it provides a single view of error trapping on multiple VMs and platforms. It also features important enhancements such as support for custom class loaders.

The areas of Web application development that are weakest in Visual Café are related to HTML. Visual Café is primarily a Java development environment (applets, servlets, standalone Java apps), but there's still a lot of HTML code to create and maintain in the average Web application, especially on the client-side. Visual Café does not have its own HTML editor (Macromedia Dreamweaver is provided in WebGain Studio). Compared to products such as SilverStream, Inc.'s SilverStream the lack of well-integrated HTML tools can be a disadvantage because of the need to shift gears between Java (object think) and HTML. It also has an impact on working with Java Server Pages (JSP). Although not alone in the problem, the integration of JSPs into the regular Java environment is similar to using HTML in Visual Café and requires a good deal of time jumping around.

Visual Café is the at the heart of WebGain Studio, a conglomeration of support products that fill in enterprise requirements such as: StructureBuilder for designing database connections with Java UML (Unified Modeling Language); a single license copy of BEA WebLogic Application Server; TopLink to map objects to relational tables at runtime; and Turbo XML for XML deployment descriptors-a better way to handle the deployment process; and, as mentioned earlier, Dreamweaver.

Like most of the competition, WebGain is striving to provide the tools that help developers get on top of the increasingly complex business of creating Internet based applications. You can always quibble with the tool selection and the relative lack of integration (more advanced XML tools here, better HTML integration there); but it gets the job done.

WebGain's effort to fit Visual Café with an appropriate saddle of enterprise-level development tools is still a work in progress. Good enough as far as it goes, but against the stiff and unrelenting competition from IBM, Oracle, Borland and Microsoft it doesn't stand out quite yet. Those who are already Visual Café devotees will be happy to see it's life extended and invigorated; others may want to wait for further developments.

WebGain, Inc.
5425 Stevens Creek Blvd
Santa Clara, CA 95051
Sales: 888-822-3409
408-517-3700
www.webgain.com

Visual Café 4 is provided in three versions: Enterprise ($2995), Expert ($799+License), and Standard ($99). WebGain Studio has two versions: Professional ($8995) and Standard ($4995)

Requirements vary greatly among the versions, typical is Visual Café 4 Enterprise Edition: Development platform - Microsoft Windows 98/NT/2000; CPU - Pentium II,