Coming of Visual Age
By Al Williams
What constitutes a visual programming environment?
It depends on who you ask, I suppose. Some vendors consider any program that
lets you place a button via a drag-and-drop visual. My standard, however,
is a little stricter.
In the July issue of Web Techniques, I discussed Visual Studio from Sun.
This software is certainly visual–:in fact, you couldn't write any Java code
with Visual Studio even if you wanted to. Everything is drag-and-drop.
This month I'll show you IBM's Visual Age for Java (VAJava), a visual product
that doesn't insist you do everything in a visual manner. Yet it still provides
many tools for visual programming. You can download a version of VAJava from
IBM's Web site to try this month's examples (visit www.software.ibm.com/ad
for download information).
The New Age
IBM's Visual Age products have a long history of being some of the most visual
development tools for the PC. There are Visual Age environments for Smalltalk
and C++, too. IBM has spent a long time working with visual development, and
it shows. Although there are a few rough spots in the product, it mostly strikes
a good balance between visual ease-of-use and programming power.
When you first start VAJava, it displays a Smart Guide to lead you through
the steps to develop a new applet (see
