Review: Visual Cafe Prelease 1
I will have to admit that after putting this
same applet together in Java Workshop and in Visual J++ that Visual
Cafe is somewhat at the advantage. After installing Visual Cafe at the
end of the day at work I proceeded to use Visual Cafe on the train
to create the applet. Installation was a breeze, no problems whatever.
It strangely does not reload the last project I was working on upon
restart; I am not sure whether that is my fault or theirs, maybe after
some more toying with it I will figure out whats what. The reason
I still have such little experience with the interface itself is partly
due to its efficiency. The applet was generated, tested, and working in
under 30 minutes.
The interface in Visual Cafe is perfect for applet construction. No hassle with events, no extra classes to worry about, really no problems at all. The only compile errors I got were from forgetting to put the imports in the source the first build. Now it is starting to appear as if the applet I chose to implement on all the IDE's is too simple. I would say more, but I learned so little about Cafe writing the applet that I cannot.
Here is the applet:
As you can see it is nearly identical to the other applets. I only worry about the cross-platform compatibility because of the absolute coordinates used in the layout. I much prefer the GridBagLayout that the Workshop uses.
I will have to review Cafe again with a more comprehensive test. It is obvious from my experience so far that Cafe is a RAD tool far superior to the other Java IDE's I have seen. If you have used the others, try this one, you may not go back.
Sam Pullara
spullara@suba.com