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???
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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