In Search of...Visaj
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Document preparation used to be a tedious, time-consuming chore. Word processors changed all of that and now anyone can easily put together a good-looking document. Many companies have tried to achieve this same goal with visual programming environments, but this is proving to be elusive.
In the past, I've worked with tools ranging from Microsoft's Visual J++ to Sun's Java Studio. All modern tools are, to some extent, visual, but there's a wide variation in what each tool can do automatically.
This month I wanted to put a somewhat lesser-known product through its paces: Visaj from Imperial Software Technology (www.ist.co.uk). This product is not exactly a full interactive development environment (IDE). Instead, it's a user interface designer that generates Java code. It can integrate directly with many popular IDEs, however, and you can use it as an adjunct to your usual tools.
Why use a separate designer? Visaj has several interesting features that can speed up your designs. Also, Visaj uses Java itself, so it will run just about anywhere.
The Plan
To exercise Visaj, I decided to write a front end for a search engine (see
Figure 1). This applet collects terms using a friendly interface and passes them along to AltaVista. It would be easy to modify the program to work with any search engine.
You should notice several important things about the user interface:
The applet uses multiple grid bag layout managers to control its appearance.
