Review: Asymetrix SuperCede Beta

[Normally I would not do this, however, since there is such a wide disparity between my review and other's reviews I would like to get some direct feedback from people who have used this product. When writing these reviews I attempt to keep all products to the same standard: I look at them based on their interface, their utility in cross-platform development, ease of use, and an ethereal quality that equates to the synchronicity with the Java vision. Have I been unfair in this review? Is the Flash compiler technology truly revolutionary? Please, comment spullara@suba.com.

After posting this review I received several comments from people regarding the Flash compiler technology. I did go back and do some small experiments with it and their demos. On my Pentium 75 w/40M I found that it was much too slow. Perhaps with a more appropiate development environment I would have found it more useful. Although I could not personally use the environment with much utility, I did find that updating a running executable was an interesting concept and would probably be very useful in large applications. As for performance, the applets run with their system seemed to be a bit faster than with Microsoft's VM although I could not make a direct comparison because I could not get the SuperCede VM to run CaffeineMark 2.5. I wonder if the Flash technology could be dissociated from their interface and used with other products?

I still stand behind my initial review of the basic features of the environment.]

Let me start out with at least one observation. This package is, shall I say, different. The beta version does not even generate Java bytecode. In fact, the package seems to be of little use to the internet developer. Apparently, the idea is to create a compiled form of Java that will compete with Visual Basic, perhaps. Maybe you are in the situation where you need your products to run only in the Windows environment, this may be the package to use in that case.

Installation went off without a hitch, however, the requirements are pretty hefty. They claim that you need 60 megs of storage and 32 megs of RAM. I am not sure about the storage requirements but I can tell you that I was not able to load in Visual Cafe at the same time as SuperCede without heavy, heavy swapping on my 40 meg laptop. I was not able to read the reviewer documentation and open the help file at the same time without it complaining of a lack of memory. Normally I can get by with Visuall J++, Cafe, and a browser running simultaneously. One of the other strange things I noticed while I was developing this simple application is that SuperCede kept a 10 meg debugging file in the directory with it. I have no idea why it needed to be so huge.

So, you may wonder, why would anyone use this environment? Well, it does generate executables, and that is kind of cool, although Microsofts SDK does something similar. The executables it generated were relatively small, I suppose, but I think that a Java class archive would have been much smaller. Since I only used the tool to generate a GUI and used external classes for the functionality I did not have much use for the debugger nor the Flash compiler technology widely toted in the press. Perhaps in a larger application, entirely developed within SuperCede, this tool would be more appropiate.

SuperCede does have some strengths. For instance, it allows you to use GridBagLayout to arrange your components in your application, unfortunately it does not mirror the behavior of the components in the form editor, i.e. it keeps the components the same size and position even though that has no relation to the final product. This behavior is better than most environments though since most do not support the layout at all. Another unfortunate aspect of the environment is that it uses custom Asymmetrix classes. This prevents you from using another compiler to compile your creations, i.e. Cafe, J++, and JDK failed to compile the code generated. Appartently this shortcoming is due to the debugging environment and it will be possible to disable the addition of the proprietary classes in the final release.

The final version, that will include DLL and bytecode generation, may get a better review. Here is the generated source code and the executable:
Form1.java
sclient.exe
SymCafeSpawnClient.class
SymCafeClientHandleConnection.class

My conclusion? Maybe I missed something but other environments offer much faster, much cleaner, and much more portable development than this product does.

Sam Pullara
spullara@suba.com

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