Review: Symantec Cafe 1.51

Symantec Cafe was straight-forward to install, requiring about 5 minutes to copy off the CD and there were no glitches in the process. I wonder, however, why companies other than Microsoft do not include the autorun scripts on there CDs. They are convenient and appear easy to create and it adds just a touch of professionalism.

Of course, the first thing I tried was duplicate my efforts with the other IDEs in this environment. I opened a new project, named it, and then chose AppExpress to do the dirty work. Creation of the intial skeleton went off without a hitch. Then I double-clicked on the resource file, it asked if I wanted to edit the file with Cafe Studio. Cafe Studio is Cafe's visual GUI creator. It is reminiscent of Visual C++/J++'s dialog creator, however, it also lets you edit events directly. One of the nice things about the code generated by Cafe is that it is independent of any other files and it includes directives that tell the editors where generated code should be put.

With my button and two text areas generated I went on to edit their properties. Converting the text field to my ChatArea was not as straight-forward as it could have been. Initially I set it up for multi-line and disabled (I did not want the user to be able to type into the ChatArea). Disabled meant something different than I expected though, the ChatArea's scrollbars could not be used with this setting. What I really needed was a flag to say that it was not editable, barring that I added a line of code: ChatArea.setEditable(false). The second glitch I came across was the fact that you cannot set an ACTION_EVENT for the text field object in Cafe, although it is a completely valid option in Java and is the preferred method of capturing the return key stroke. So, I added the clicked action to my Button and then modified the generated code somewhat to handle an ACTION_EVENT in my text field as well. These two problems are not damning, but it does make me wonder if anything else has been left out unintentionally. The other problem I have with the visual editor is one that is expected to be fixed soon. I want to use GridBagLayout instead of absolute positioning, we all know that absolute positioning is not portable across systems.

Enough of the visual editor, most people will probably use Visual Cafe for simple applets such as this example anyway. What about the rest of system? The editor was excellent with good highlighting and typical Windows formatting. I just wish that more Windows editors would allow you to reformat a line or section of code easily, like Emacs. Perhaps there is an emulation mode that I missed. The debugger was also a dream to use, the bubble help variable value feature is especially cool. Just put your cursor over a variable for a second and its value pops right up. Compiling was extremely quick, although it did compile sometimes when nothing was changed, that may be a factor in large projects. Class browsing is getting more and more attention as of late. Cafe includes a Smalltalk type browser along with hierarchy display. The browser allows you to look at only the method in question and then edit it like a separate file, meaning, if you change it then when you change methods or exit the browser it asks you to confirm the change.

Here is the little applet I generated for your reference:

CSocketClient.java

What are my conclusions about development in Symantec Cafe? There are still some bugs in the Studio, but I am sure that they will be worked out in the next release. If you are going to do visual GUI development you are probably better off in Visual Cafe or one of the other GUI development systems.

If you are planning on writing real applications it looks as though Symantec Cafe has the upper-hand against the other environments. Although, in some of my other reviews I blasted the floating-window concept, it was not bad in Cafe. Care has been taken to arrange them usably, even in a 640x480 environment (like my laptop for instance :). Combined with their server product, dbANYWHERE, I am sure that you could throw together some interesting projects in relatively short order.

Sam Pullara
spullara@suba.com

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