Building Distributed Web Applications with Visual JavaScript
By Emily Vander Veer
From the name, you might assume that
Netscape's Visual JavaScript is nothing more than a graphical JavaScript language editor. To a certain extent, you'd be right; Visual JavaScript is a graphical JavaScript editor. Its appeal lies in its support not for developing JavaScript code, but for reusing it. The Visual JavaScript development environment fully supports the visual programming-by-construction model popularized by Java IDEs such as Lotus' BeanMachine and Aimtech's Jamba, but with a unique twist: It allows developers to construct distributed applications from components implemented not just in Java, but in JavaScript and Common Object Request Broker Architecture interface definition language (CORBA IDL) as well.
The JavaScript language itself has evolved at an astonishing pace. The advent of server-side JavaScript and the JavaScriptBean object model have elevated it to official programming language status, and Visual JavaScript is currently the only IDE that fully supports it.
This article provides an overview of Visual JavaScript, including its component model and user interface (as it appears in preview release 3). You then see a complete example that demonstrates how to design, assemble, and test a distributed Web application using Visual JavaScript's predefined components. Finally, you get an introduction to the Visual JavaScript Component Developer's Kit, a development toolkit you can use to create additional Visual JavaScript components.<>
