Bottom Line If you develop on the Mac because having a good user interface is important to you, Roaster is an excellent choice for Java development. If Symantec wants to keep discerning Mac developers interested in its tools, it needs to think about upgrading Cafe, or discontinuing it in favor of Visual Cafe.
Visual Cafe is an ambitious product that has not yet realized its potential. CodeWarrior Pro is the premiere power tool for Mac-hosted development in any language. For those just starting out, there is no better deal than Discover Programming for Macintosh. The tools - an overview This section provides an overview of all the tools I reviewed.
As I mentioned earlier, I chose only those tools that are in final release. Here's a list of those tools that made the cut:.
CodeWarrior Professional/Discover Programming for Macintosh from Metrowerks. Roaster 3.0 from Roaster Technologies. Cafe 1.5 and Visual Cafe 1.0.1 from Symantec Metrowerks CodeWarrior Professional/Discover Programming for Macintosh.
In the last 10 years many new text editors became available for Mac OS X. Since I have tried most of them I wanted to give an overview and a brief description about each one of them.
Click image for expanded view (77K) In the foreground is CodeWarrior Pro's clas browser, with the toolbar above it. Behind that, the class hierarchy viewer is visible, and in the background, CodeWarrior's project manager. With CodeWarrior Pro Release 1 (sometimes referred to as CodeWarrior 12), Metrowerks has merged its Mac-hosted and PC-hosted development environments into one package, replacing the separate versions of CodeWarrior previously available for Mac and Windows.
Included on the three CodeWarrior Pro CDs are compilers for several languages in addition to Java, including Object Pascal, C, and C, all of which are hosted within a new version (2.0) of the CodeWarrior IDE. The project formats are not yet the same across platforms, so Mac users and PC users can't currently share CodeWarrior project files. With its multi-language, multi-platform support, CodeWarrior Pro (priced at 99) may be overkill for someone who is just getting started or who has no need for Pascal, C, and C compilers. Metrowerks, however, doesn't dismiss beginners. To support those new to Java development on the Mac, the company offers Discover Programming for Macintosh.
At only 9, this package includes just the Mac-hosted tools from CodeWarrior Pro (including support for Java, C, C, and Object Pascal) - a remarkable deal. The license does not allow you to develop commercial software, though, so if you're a professional developer, Discover Programming is not an option. If you're a student or an educator who would like the full power of CodeWarrior Pro, you may qualify for academic pricing. (Contact Metrowerks for more details.) As with all of the IDEs reviewed in this article, CodeWarrior supports Java 1.0.2 and includes both a JVM and a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler (PowerPC only). In addition, Metrowerks gives you a sneak preview of its tools for JDK 1.1.
Check out the Thrill Seekers folder on the installation CDs for these pre-release versions of CodeWarrior tools with 1.1 support. Shortly before this article was published, Microsoft made available a pre-release version of Internet Explorer 4.0 for Macintosh, including a new JVM and JIT supplied by - you guessed it - Metrowerks. The Metrowerks VM included with this version of IE 4.0 includes full support for all aspects of Java 1.1 except RMI (Remote Method Invocation) and JNI (Java Native Interface). Metrowerks has promised a soon-to-be-released update for CodeWarrior Pro with full support for Java 1.1, including JNI and RMI.
Roaster Technologies Roaster 3.0. Click image for expanded view (45K) In the foreground is Roaster's class browser, with the class tree viewer visible behind it. In the upper-left corner is Roaster's package-oriented project manager.
Notice the menus next to each file, which allow the user to navigate directly to any method defined in that file. Notice also the Scripts menu in the menu bar. Users can easily write their own scripts and have them show up here simply by adding them to Roaster's Scripts folder. Release 3.0 is the first final release of Roaster, following a string of Developer Releases. New in version 3.0 is an optionally enabled JIT (still considered beta quality) for both PowerPC and 68K Macs, many bug-fixes, a stable debugger, the ability to build libraries in zip format, and a generally improved IDE. There are also a few bundled third-party libraries supporting database access among other things. At the MacWorld Expo in Boston, Roaster Technologies' John Dhabolt demonstrated Version 3.1 (not yet publicly available), which allows developers to choose between Roaster's VM and the MRJ VM.
This means that when MRJ 2.0 is available, Roaster 3.1 will support Java 1.1 via MRJ 2.0. Symantec Cafe 1.5 and Visual Cafe 1.0.1. Click image for expanded view (38K) Cafe's editor window is in the foreground, with the class browser visible just above it. On the right are two project manager windows for different projects. Notice that Cafe's class browser is unable to find the selected function even though it is part of the current project.
Symantec's Java tools for the Mac come in two flavors: Cafe and Visual Cafe. Cafe is a standard, Java-only IDE, with its own VM and a JIT. For the most part, other than bug fixes and the addition of a 68K/PowerPC JIT, Version 1.5 of Cafe is not significantly different from Developer Release 2.0, covered my last comparative review of Mac IDEs for JavaWorld.
Does Anyone Know Any Good Gui Ocaml Ide For Mac Pro
(Mentioned at the beginning of this article, you can also find a link to it in the.) Despite the similarity in name, Visual Cafe is a substantially different product from Cafe. Not merely a visual tool living alongside, or grafted onto, the same old Cafe IDE, Visual Cafe is a development environment designed from the ground up with visual development in mind. It strives to let developers create complete Java applets and applications - not just layout components on screen - without ever writing a line of code. 'Serious' developers may scoff at this idea, and, of course, there are limitations to the concept; Symantec recognizes the limitations, so Visual Cafe doesprovide a full-featured IDE.
Click image for expanded view (70K) This figure shows how easy it is to add menus to an application in Visual Cafe. The property list on the right is dynamically updated as you manipulate objects graphically. GUI components can be dragged and dropped from the toolbar palette on the top of the screen directly onto a mock-up of your running application. This figure shows only a few of Visual Cafe's libraries of components, but there are many more.
It's a pity Visual Cafe is so unstable, because in terms of its design, it shows evidence of real genius. Coming soon from Symantec is Visual Cafe Pro for the Macintosh (already available for Windows). On the Windows platform, the main difference between Visual Cafe and Visual Cafe Pro is that the Pro version is bundled with Symantec's dbANYWHRE Workgroup Server, Sybase SQL standalone version, and Netscape FastTrack Server. However, none of these additional products currently exist for the Macintosh, so it's hard to tell in advance what the Mac version of Visual Cafe Pro will actually look like.
Furthermore, Visual Cafe on the Mac is so unstable that it seems Symantec's development team will have their hands full for a while just fixing bugs. Perhaps this is part of the reason that Visual Cafe Pro for the Mac is behind schedule (it was originally slated for an August ship). Evaluation criteria I've evaluated the tools with respect to the following criteria:. User interface: How intuitive is the product's interface? How Mac-like is it? To what extent does it actually speed development relative to other platforms? 'What kind of documentation is provided with the product?'
. Performance: How well does the VM perform? How fast is the compiler? How stable is the product overall?. Functionality: To what extent does the tool provide a full-featured development environment?
Does it allow the developer to create double-clickable Mac applications? Does it support native methods? What version of the Java platform does it support? User interface: Roaster rules the roost The single most important reason Mac users prefer Macs is that the user interface helps us get our work done faster and with less hassle. This is a very hard thing to quantify, but as you work with a tool regularly, you begin to get a feel for whether the tool is helping you or hindering you.
Just another note on the topic of IB. One of the big wins in aqua is that the UI is basically just an OO object graph. That has all sorts of good features like allowing you to create the GUI in an editor and serialize it to disk (that is what IB does) then the GUI is just deserialized at runtime and your are golden. This is also trivial to do by hand in vi, just instantiate the objects and hook 'em up. Tedious and error prone as all get out, but easy.
I would suggest just looking at the docs for each component and how to create it and set the 50 fields to sensible defaults. / masochism - its what's fer dinner!
Well this is really kind of cool. In IB when you make a window object and add say a button you are actually manipulating instances of NSWindow and NSButton. You are working with actual real objects. When you save a nib file the root object, say the window, is serialized to a data object. In this process the whole object graph is included. This is very similar to object serialization in Java. Later at runtime this freeze-dried object graph is decoded from the data stored in the nib file.
This is different than C style gui builders because in those cases you never actually interact with real gui objects. Rather, they are pretend components that are then used to drive the generation of code to generate the real components.