Feel the Beat with Marimba's Bongo
By Chris Baron
In 1996, four programmers from the original Java-development team left Sun to form Marimba and produce industrial-strength Java-development tools for user interface and application administration.
Bongo, one of Marimba's two shipping products, allows developers to create either a Java-application interface or a standalone Java-based application called a "presentation." A Bongo presentation resembles a HyperCard stack -- it allows developers to quickly create an application with a sophisticated user interface, but without the tedious programming of directly coding in Java or C/C++. Bongo's nonprogramming, visual approach makes it ideal for producing simple applications that don't involve a lot of processing, such as product demonstrations, user-interface prototypes, and training applications. Bongo is fully integrated with Castanet, Marimba's other product, a technology for remotely installing and updating Java applications.
The commercial version of Bongo is distributed electronically from the Marimba Web site; a fully functional demo version is also available. The $495 retail price indicates that Bongo is aimed at the professional developer community rather than the home or small-scale developer market. The evaluation version of the software I received from the company came in the form of a book (with software on CD-ROM) entitled The Official Guide to Marimba Bongo, by Danny Goodman (Sams.N
