What's wrong w. Visual Cafe?

S

Steve Burrus

Hi all, I Steve Burrus have noticed in a post one time that
someone/somebody has said that the Visual Cafe IDE, formerly put out by
the Webgain company, is really no good at all these days for Java
development! In fact, they said that it is not much better than either
Notepad or the emacs editor! Now, I am a bit confused, the last time
that I tried to use VC, it seemed to be quite good and was fully
"feature-rich" enough to do everything that I personally wanted to do in
Java development. Can someone please explain to me just what is wrong
with VC these days?
 
C

Chris Smith

Steve said:
Hi all, I Steve Burrus have noticed in a post one time that
someone/somebody has said that the Visual Cafe IDE, formerly put out by
the Webgain company, is really no good at all these days for Java
development! In fact, they said that it is not much better than either
Notepad or the emacs editor! Now, I am a bit confused, the last time
that I tried to use VC, it seemed to be quite good and was fully
"feature-rich" enough to do everything that I personally wanted to do in
Java development. Can someone please explain to me just what is wrong
with VC these days?

For one thing, I don't know where you'd obtain a copy. WebGain bought
it from Symantec, then sold it to TogetherSoft, which was recently
aquired by Borland. I can't find any mention of the product on
Borland's web site.

--
www.designacourse.com
The Easiest Way to Train Anyone... Anywhere.

Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer
MindIQ Corporation
 
R

Roedy Green

Can someone please explain to me just what is wrong
with VC these days?

Is anyone supporting it?

Webgain has gone out of business and Togethersoft now has Visual Cafe.
I don't know what they are doing with it.

Togethersoft's website is not responding. Have they died too?
 
S

Steve Burrus

Roedy said:
Webgain has gone out of business and Togethersoft now has Visual Cafe.
I don't know what they are doing with it.

Look, I get the picture that Visual Cafe is very hard and tough to come
by anywhere online these days, but back to my original question, namely
what was so wrong with the Visual Cafe IDE when a lot more developers
were using it than now??? Was it just growing too old, and had outlived
its' usefulness?
 
M

Missaka Wijekoon

Never coded in an MS environment, but my guess is that:

It supports a very old version of the JDK (version 1.0X?). Java has
made oodles of changes since.
It has windows native hooks that creates less than 100% Java bytecode.

-Misk


Steve said:
Look, I get the picture that Visual Cafe is very hard and tough to come
by anywhere online these days, but back to my original question, namely
what was so wrong with the Visual Cafe IDE when a lot more developers
were using it than now??? Was it just growing too old, and had outlived
its' usefulness?


--
========================================================================
Missaka Wijekoon (a.k.a. Misk) (e-mail address removed)
Sr. Software Engineer http://www.villageEdocs.com
VillageEdocs
========================================================================
 
R

Roedy Green

Look, I get the picture that Visual Cafe is very hard and tough to come
by anywhere online these days, but back to my original question, namely
what was so wrong with the Visual Cafe IDE when a lot more developers
were using it than now??? Was it just growing too old, and had outlived
its' usefulness?

I used it a lot in the Java 1.0 days. Part of the problem is I now
have a bunch of orphan code that depended on VC proprietary classes.

Someday I will have to rewrite it all.
 
W

William Brogden

Look, I get the picture that Visual Cafe is very hard and tough to come
by anywhere online these days, but back to my original question, namely
what was so wrong with the Visual Cafe IDE when a lot more developers
were using it than now??? Was it just growing too old, and had outlived
its' usefulness?

I used to work with VC alot - even wrote a book about it. At one time
it was the best IDE available. However, they never got it completely
debugged so it would die occasionally - very annoying.

Bill
 
J

Joe

burrus1 said:
Look, I get the picture that Visual Cafe is very hard and tough to come
by anywhere online these days, but back to my original question, namely
what was so wrong with the Visual Cafe IDE when a lot more developers
were using it than now??? Was it just growing too old, and had outlived
its' usefulness?


I've used Cafe, JBUilder and Websphere, as well as Emacs to develop
applications. I can't say that I feel strongly one way or the other. My
sense of it is that Cafe is much like a good TV show that gets bounced
around from night to night: It's changed hands so many times people give
up looking for it.
 
D

Dimitri Maziuk

Steve Burrus sez:
Look, I get the picture that Visual Cafe is very hard and tough to come
by anywhere online these days, but back to my original question, namely
what was so wrong with the Visual Cafe IDE when a lot more developers
were using it than now??? Was it just growing too old, and had outlived
its' usefulness?

Proprietary classes and no documentation to tell you which jars
you need to bundle with your application to make it run on other
machines.

Dima
 
B

Bill Joy

Visual Cafe had a couple of major problems.

One it was that it released a very buggy release when there
were high quality competitors plus did not provide any fixes
for many months. It got so bad that ultimately Symantec
spun it off into a separate company which decided to play
catch-up by buying a lot of little companies with software
components which it could not integrate well.

Another is that Borland had released its JBuilder all-Java
implementation proving that a complete IDE could be
implemented in Swing. This started a market shift where all
its competitors needed to do the same. For instance, this
helped IBM to decide to kill its VisualAge product and
introduce its Eclipse/WebSphere platform, and Sun to buy
NetBeans.

Visual Cafe was in maintenance-mode (killing off its new
buyer market) while in the midst of being ported to Java
when it ultimately ran out of cash despite infusions from
Intel and HP.


visual cafe was making some really great inroads before
jbuilder showed
up. it remained a leader in the field but between borland
being better
financed and more established the java community eventually
joined on
the band wagon. with is such a shame given the quality of
that product

- perry
 
P

perry

visual cafe was making some really great inroads before jbuilder showed
up. it remained a leader in the field but between borland being better
financed and more established the java community eventually joined on
the band wagon. with is such a shame given the quality of that product

- perry
 
S

Steve Burrus

perry said:
visual cafe was making some really great inroads before jbuilder showed
up. it remained a leader in the field but between borland being better
financed and more established the java community eventually joined on
the band wagon. with is such a shame given the quality of that product

- perry

Perry, do you agree with others in this group who have said that the
main technical drawback to VC was its' dire lack of any documentation
and also its' proprietary classes were not easily portable at all???!!!
 
P

perry

oh, i do not disagree with you that VC was taking a gamble with their
propietary approach, proprietary code always runs that risk. unless it
becomes the "de facto" standard. in VC's case they were simply not
influential enough with Sun to make that kind of impact. but you have to
remember, VC came out at a time with Java was at it's very early stages
and the tremendous demand for Java grew over night. VC was just one of
the first vendors to try and meet the need.

then Sun came out not only the next version (Java 1.2) but it came with
documentation so in effect VC sort of outdone itself.

also true is the rather unfavourable impression that was being given, or
rather that poor implementations of applets were giving Java at that
time. i think many in the C++ community didn't move into Java
immediately because all they could see was flakiness in the performance
of applets on the early browsers. which of course was NOT a proper
representation of Java. i should know, i made the exact same mistake
myself. until a friend of mine, took me aside and showed me a proper
demonstration of Java (using VC actually). he had two years of Java
under his belt at that time and was considered guru (and swore by VC).

what was funny about that project is all the propaganda that the company
was eating up on microsoft at that time. i think they were sold on the
"com" model, that was the buzz word of the day. yet at the end of the
project, it was my buddy writing a monster amount of java on the client
side that was saved the day. all this crap on how java was suppose to be
"interprated" and "not as efficient".... like optimized inline code was
going to make a difference when passing transactions across a wire.

i can see why they were paying so much money for seasoned consultants at
that time (and still do)... many people around a computer with a comp
sci degree were completely lost.... now thats not to say a comp sci
degree is a waste a time, on the contrary, a comp sci degree gives you
many things regular programming experience does not, but thats a
different topic

just speaking from my experience

- perry
 
S

Steve Burrus

Perry, you are absolutely the very first "voice" in this entire
discussion group to have any kind of a favorable impression of the
"late, lamented" Visual Cafe!! I "waded" thru your rather long last
response on this thread [see below] and that's very definitely the
impression that I got after reading all of it!! Say, I would still like
to able to be using it just a little bit more! You don't happen to know,
offhand, if either a setup CD or maybe a download link to get it could
now be available, do you???

************************************************************************************************
 
S

Steve Burrus

Perry, you said to me : >>"Have you tried to find it using overnet?"<<
Please, please forgive my utter dumb and stupid naivety, but what is
"overnet" anyway???!!! I have absolutely never used that particular
online service before!!
 
P

perry

you know, i use to have an installation of it on my hard disk. and
ironically enough i did do a complete zip of my drive.... let me go
look, you might be in luck. i can't vouche for what kind of shape it's
in, it installed on a win2k machine. but if i didn't delete before the
date of the backup, your in luck...

- perry

ps.
have you tried to find it using overnet ?

Steve said:
Perry, you are absolutely the very first "voice" in this entire
discussion group to have any kind of a favorable impression of the
"late, lamented" Visual Cafe!! I "waded" thru your rather long last
response on this thread [see below] and that's very definitely the
impression that I got after reading all of it!! Say, I would still like
to able to be using it just a little bit more! You don't happen to know,
offhand, if either a setup CD or maybe a download link to get it could
now be available, do you???

************************************************************************************************

oh, i do not disagree with you that VC was taking a gamble with their
propietary approach, proprietary code always runs that risk. unless it
becomes the "de facto" standard. in VC's case they were simply not
influential enough with Sun to make that kind of impact. but you have
to remember, VC came out at a time with Java was at it's very early
stages and the tremendous demand for Java grew over night. VC was just
one of the first vendors to try and meet the need.

then Sun came out not only the next version (Java 1.2) but it came
with documentation so in effect VC sort of outdone itself.

also true is the rather unfavourable impression that was being given,
or rather that poor implementations of applets were giving Java at
that time. i think many in the C++ community didn't move into Java
immediately because all they could see was flakiness in the
performance of applets on the early browsers. which of course was NOT
a proper representation of Java. i should know, i made the exact same
mistake myself. until a friend of mine, took me aside and showed me a
proper demonstration of Java (using VC actually). he had two years of
Java under his belt at that time and was considered guru (and swore by
VC).

what was funny about that project is all the propaganda that the
company was eating up on microsoft at that time. i think they were
sold on the "com" model, that was the buzz word of the day. yet at the
end of the project, it was my buddy writing a monster amount of java
on the client side that was saved the day. all this crap on how java
was suppose to be "interprated" and "not as efficient".... like
optimized inline code was going to make a difference when passing
transactions across a wire.

i can see why they were paying so much money for seasoned consultants
at that time (and still do)... many people around a computer with a
comp sci degree were completely lost.... now thats not to say a comp
sci degree is a waste a time, on the contrary, a comp sci degree gives
you many things regular programming experience does not, but thats a
different topic

just speaking from my experience

- perry
 
B

Bryce

Is anyone supporting it?

Webgain has gone out of business and Togethersoft now has Visual Cafe.
I don't know what they are doing with it.

Togethersoft's website is not responding. Have they died too?

Didn't Borland buy Togethersoft?
 
P

Preston L. Bannister

Steve Burrus said:
Look, I get the picture that Visual Cafe is very hard and tough to come
by anywhere online these days, but back to my original question, namely
what was so wrong with the Visual Cafe IDE when a lot more developers
were using it than now??? Was it just growing too old, and had outlived
its' usefulness?

Visual Cafe (originally just "Cafe") was arguably the best available
Java IDE in the very early days of Java. Unfortunately Cafe was
always slightly buggy (or worse). In the early days this was somewhat
forgivable. Later versions never really did improve in reliability.

I bought, used, and recommended the early versions of Cafe and
VisualCafe.

By the time JBuilder arrived VisualCafe was no longer a competitive
product. As a still-buggy and somewhat behind product - frankly -
VisualCafe sank from sight simply because that is what (in the end)
the product deserved.

Don't waste your time with VisualCafe. Personally I would recommend
Eclipse (and the $$$ Websphere Studio products), NetBeans, and
JBuilder in that order. Pick one - they are all excellent.
 

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