Spin Doctor
By Al Williams
In the not-so-distant past, vendors called anything that let you drag AWT components around a "visual development tool." Recently, there has been an emphasis on developing genuine visual tools. By my definition, a genuine visual tool is one that lets you define behaviors, not just appearances, visually.
One new development tool that follows this sort of thinking is Spin from Zat (see
Product Information). Spin is like many other Bean-oriented Java environments in that it tries to show you a live view of your program as you develop it. However, Spin offers several interesting ways to add behavior to your program. It also has some interesting new ideas about how to integrate the tools that you use.
In this article, I'll take you on a tour of the developer preview edition of Spin. Zat admits this is not the production release, so there might be a rough edge or two. Still, the product is useful in its current state. I'll tell you about what Spin can do, and develop a rudimentary Web-page creation program using only the tools that Spin provides.
Starting Up
You can download an evaluation copy of Spin from the Zat Web site. When you do, they'll email you a key to unlock the copy. The key expires 21 days from when the date it's sent, so be sure to download it when you're ready to try it, not before. The current version of Spin works only with the JDK 1.1.7, so you'll need that, too.
