6 ms·

VisualAge for Java 1.0 – Let the Future Begin (1997)

74 points by rufus_foreman 6y ago

g051051 6y ago
VisualAge for Java was an amazing tool, far ahead of its time.
- blinkingled 6y ago
  Yeah it was surprisingly polished and usable - I used it first around 1999 and there wasn’t anything close to it at the time.
  - sorokod 6y ago
    Beg to differ, Symantec Visual Cafe was way better.
    - blinkingled 6y ago
      Possible, I never heard of it until now. How was it for server side development?
      - sorokod 6y ago
        Server side development was all I did and at the time it was the best ide in my opinion.
  - guenthert 6y ago
    I particularly liked their handling of Java Beans. It not only created the stub code, but even after one filled in the blanks, the IDE could continue to modify the code using the GUI (e.g. connect different beans). Other IDEs at that time allowed you to only create the stub code and once you manually modified it, they were unable to assist you further. Seems others didn't quite appreciate this "visual programming" as much and the idea died out.
  - g051051 6y ago
    It was based on their previous VisualAge for Smalltalk product, which was a really amazing and solid product as well.
  - drran 6y ago
    Omnicore CodeGuide IDE was much better.
bdcravens 6y ago
"Thus, Java has the potential, at least, to break the hold that the hardware and operating system monoliths have on the computer world, and could make hardware and software tycoons like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as obsolete in the 21st century as railway barons have become in the 20th." The author had an idea that while we laugh today, had a glimmer of truth - it was open source, and not Java itself, that ensured that "tycoons" didn't a have a stranglehold on the industry.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  I suppose it depends on how you view “stranglehold”. They certainly are listening to their customers who prefer “open” in some contexts. So in some ways they’re better behaved. And most excitement and activity in server side ecosystems tends to be open source. But in terms of economic might, ie. revenue and equity, open source has been a weapon wielded by the tycoons to add to their might. Linux is successful but the dominant vendor is owned by IBM. Canonical some day may also get scooped up. Intel is finally feeling the pressure of custom chips and portable languages (it’s market cap is down to $230b), but Microsoft is nearing 2 trillion in market cap, Apple is 2.3 trillion, and Google/Amazon aren’t far behind either. The result is that we arguably have more open and higher quality infrastructure than ever before. But the ultimate tycoons remain the same - with Google + Amazon being the new entrants.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  And yet MS, Apple, and Google still have a stranglehold on desktops, outside of a tiny minority of restricted fleet use cases. The web, not open source, was a potential escape, but after a brief window were seeing that fall back as the walked garden app world takes over.
sorokod 6y ago
I remember it as a ponderous resource hog.
- rufus_foreman 6y ago
  "First, you'll have to consider the prerequisites, which are pretty significant, particularly for RAM. You'll need Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 or OS/2 Warp V4, an SVGA display, and, IBM says, 32MB of RAM (with 48MB recommended), at least 45MB of free disk space for the software (with an additional 30MB free disk space for swapping), and lastly, an unzip program" I think 32MB would have been about what a typical desktop would have come with in 1997, so yeah, it was a hog. I remember my manager buying extra memory for us and having us install it ourselves because he didn't want to wait for IT.
  - soonnow 6y ago
    God we used it with the IBM San Francisco framework, which was trying to model every business interaction in the world. Too say it was abstract would be an understatement. Because it was so generic it didn't just have an amount attached to an transaction, instead it modeled a Money object that had a currency object. I'm sure it was well done to some degree, but loading that framework into Visual Age absolutely killed the poor 2000 era machine.
nathanwallace 6y ago
Fun fact ... "VisualAge for Java was implemented in Smalltalk and the Team facility used ENVY/Developer under the hood" [1]. Of course eventually that product and team morphed into Eclipse. I was lucky enough to play as small part as a college-age intern working at an Object Technology International [2] Lab in Sydney. I soaked in the pair programming, watching the screen flash by. I read every book they gave me (e.g. The Toyota Way, this was before XP / Agile books existed). I was amazed they actually paid me to work on these problems. I was so proud to make contributions and still remember fondly the hand-drawn diagram of the architecture passed down like a relic through the team. I am still inspired by their passion and commitment to delivery. I definitely would not be the person I am today without the career defining experience working for Adrian Cho [3] and Dave Thomas [4] during that time. Periods like that are rare in a career - grab them if you can! 1 - https://paulhammant.com/2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/ https://paulhammant.com/2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/ 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Technology_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Technology_Internationa... 3 - https://www.adriancho.com/ https://www.adriancho.com/ 4 - https://www.davethomas.net/ https://www.davethomas.net/
- rzzzt 6y ago
  Eclipse used the same "running man" icon for the "run" command until version 2.0, IIRC.
- maire 6y ago
  Erich Gamma worked for Object Technology when VisualAge was being developed so using XP/Agile before the XP book does not surprise me. I worked with Erich before Visual Age when he developed the Presentation Framework. He came up with a process identical to XP. When XP came out I realized that Erich and Kent Beck were friends. Erich is so prolific that he doesn't remember everything he invented. He is also generous.
  - osipov 6y ago
    Erich is also one of the Gang of Four, the authors of the Design Patterns book. The fact that IBM did not recognize him as a Fellow and let him leave for Microsoft tell you a lot about why IBM's stock is in the gutter.
pdevr 6y ago
I was lucky to see and work with this IDE in a real project, long after it stopped "existing". The company had code written using Visual Age, and it needed to be ported out of it. Wasn't too bad, considering how old it was. Now I look at VS Code (Disclaimer: I haven't looked at the source code of Electron), and there doesn't seem to be much innovation visually. Most IDEs seem to follow the layout of websites - a left sidebar, a main section, and an optional right sidebar, with a footer. Note: If someone here builds a different UI for IDEs, I will be an enthusiastic beta tester. Behind the user interfaces, a lot of things have changed for the better. Integration with other tools in the DevOps pipeline, ability to test quickly, autocomplete tools that understand frameworks, technologies and even contexts - all that has happened behind the scenes.
- madhadron 6y ago
  > If someone here builds a different UI for IDEs, I will be an enthusiastic beta tester. The interface you're seeing is still alive and well in most Smalltalk environments. If you're on Windows, try Dolphin Smalltalk, which is now available for free.
- amitp 6y ago
  https://gtoolkit.com/ https://gtoolkit.com/ looks different from most IDEs I've seen, but I haven't tried it yet.
WoodenChair 6y ago
An aside to this specific product, but unfortunately IMHO we have gone backwards in terms of being able to visually layout GUIs (at least in the mainstream). Regardless of the other merits of modern ecosystems, in terms of purely visual layout of GUIs (WYSIWYG with drag & drop mouse interface IOW) I think: - '90s/'00s Java IDEs > Modern Java IDEs - Dreamweaver/Frontpage > Fast Refresh Cycle - Visual Basic > Modern .NET - Interface Builder > SwiftUI
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Visual Basic == VB.NET with Windows Forms It isn't flashy, but it is still there. Did a project on it in 2016. Not that long ago.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dvdkon 6y ago
  I think the demise of WYSIWYG GUI builders was partly just it "going out of fashion", but also partly because of rising requirements for dynamic GUIs, meaning actually changing the layout programatically, but also things like arbitrary resizing and dynamically switching based on device type ("responsive" design). All of the popular 90s RAD design tools dealt with resizing as an afterthought, which made them obsolete in many cases and probably contributed negatively to the reputation of the whole class of software. Today's WYSISYG tools (I'd say as early as mid 2000s or even before) have certainly rectified these early mistakes, but I guess fashion moved on by then.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Motif, Windows Forms, WPF, Swing all support responsive design via layout managers, and the tools do support them. And there are such tools for Web development as well, however they are oriented for the target market that actually pays for such kind of tooling, for example https://www.outsystems.com/ https://www.outsystems.com/
pulse7 6y ago
I still have the original VisualAge for Java installation CD. Came from Smalltalk and wanted to have a similar IDE for Java. After initial releases IBM didn't make any new version for a long time... they built the Eclipse in "stealth mode" and released it as open-source... and made VisualAge for Java obsolete...
- alblue 6y ago
  Me too :-) https://twitter.com/alblue/status/1266322655604588544?s=20 https://twitter.com/alblue/status/1266322655604588544?s=20 I interviewed Mike Milinkovich about the VAJ->Eclipse transition in 2013: https://www.infoq.com/interviews/Milinkovich-past-present-future-Eclipse/ https://www.infoq.com/interviews/Milinkovich-past-present-fu...
chopete3 6y ago
VA for Java would have survived much longer had it not make a fundamental mistake. The complete project data, UI, configuration, classes, files, etc.,) was stored in a single file. That file appeared more like a database file. That helped it show errors in realtime, keep the project always accurate, and screen transitions slick. It was difficult for multiple developers to work in a single project. It was around the same time source control systems were becoming workplace tools and the concept of multiple developers working on a single file. In those days, it was not still possible for multiple developers (Visual SourceSafe) to work on a single file at a time
- nfrankel 6y ago
  Definitely. I used it at my job and the registry (as it was called) was saved on a Windows network drive. As you can imagine, sometimes the network was not so reliable and the registry became corrupted. We had to copy the one of another developer and lost all our work in the process. Fun times!
- projektfu 6y ago
  There were a few, e.g. StarTeam and CVS, that allowed concurrent development and merging.
- nathanwallace 6y ago
  True. It was an incredibly powerful model, but developers like files they can see. I mentioned in my earlier comment a "hand-drawn diagram of the architecture" - it was in fact a picture of the exact layout of this database including all the pointer blocks etc between the classes, methods, versions, etc. One project I did was to convert that file format & pointer model to support larger database sizes of 16GB (IIRC). Fun exploring and updating that code. For testing I built a massive fake DB with random classes, methods, etc. The crazy thing was when that fake repo zipped down to almost nothing because it had so much repetition in the names!
- EdwardCoffin 6y ago
  IBM Smalltalk was perfectly usable for multiple developers. Didn't VA Java just use the ENVY version control from the underlying Smalltalk system? I'm sure they could have.
nfrankel 6y ago
Funny to see that. I used it 20 years ago. Now I definitely feel my age...
mastazi 6y ago
Page seems to be temporarily down. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210123172552/https://www.tug.ca/articles/Volume13/V13N1/V13N1_Jenkins_VisualAge-for-Java.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210123172552/https://www.tug.c...
- rufus_foreman 6y ago
  There's a "Contact the Web Master" link. Also from 1997.
throwawayForMe2 6y ago
I very much enjoyed VA for Java. We were using Smalltalk with Gemstone for a number of years, but the internet and Java killed the Smalltalk industry, so we migrated everything to Java using VA for Java and early Websphere. VA for Java hid the idea of source files and gave a good illusion of a dynamic and “live” Smalltalk-like environment. Later moving to eclipse was the end of that illusion and any Smalltalk feel. Added: we also had no problem with version control in Smalltalk or Java, both tool sets provided great team tools
tluyben2 6y ago
It was great and well ahead of it's time. The wonky part was the db storage.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> 32MB of RAM I have 32 GB now and IntelliJ still struggles to keep up...

74 points by rufus_foreman 6y ago

g051051 6y ago

VisualAge for Java was an amazing tool, far ahead of its time.

blinkingled 6y ago
Yeah it was surprisingly polished and usable - I used it first around 1999 and there wasn’t anything close to it at the time.
- sorokod 6y ago
  Beg to differ, Symantec Visual Cafe was way better.
  - blinkingled 6y ago
    Possible, I never heard of it until now. How was it for server side development?
    - sorokod 6y ago
      Server side development was all I did and at the time it was the best ide in my opinion.
- guenthert 6y ago
  I particularly liked their handling of Java Beans. It not only created the stub code, but even after one filled in the blanks, the IDE could continue to modify the code using the GUI (e.g. connect different beans). Other IDEs at that time allowed you to only create the stub code and once you manually modified it, they were unable to assist you further. Seems others didn't quite appreciate this "visual programming" as much and the idea died out.
- g051051 6y ago
  It was based on their previous VisualAge for Smalltalk product, which was a really amazing and solid product as well.
- drran 6y ago
  Omnicore CodeGuide IDE was much better.

bdcravens 6y ago

"Thus, Java has the potential, at least, to break the hold that the hardware and operating system monoliths have on the computer world, and could make hardware and software tycoons like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as obsolete in the 21st century as railway barons have become in the 20th." The author had an idea that while we laugh today, had a glimmer of truth - it was open source, and not Java itself, that ensured that "tycoons" didn't a have a stranglehold on the industry.

parasubvert 6y ago
I suppose it depends on how you view “stranglehold”. They certainly are listening to their customers who prefer “open” in some contexts. So in some ways they’re better behaved. And most excitement and activity in server side ecosystems tends to be open source. But in terms of economic might, ie. revenue and equity, open source has been a weapon wielded by the tycoons to add to their might. Linux is successful but the dominant vendor is owned by IBM. Canonical some day may also get scooped up. Intel is finally feeling the pressure of custom chips and portable languages (it’s market cap is down to $230b), but Microsoft is nearing 2 trillion in market cap, Apple is 2.3 trillion, and Google/Amazon aren’t far behind either. The result is that we arguably have more open and higher quality infrastructure than ever before. But the ultimate tycoons remain the same - with Google + Amazon being the new entrants.
alisonkisk 6y ago
And yet MS, Apple, and Google still have a stranglehold on desktops, outside of a tiny minority of restricted fleet use cases. The web, not open source, was a potential escape, but after a brief window were seeing that fall back as the walked garden app world takes over.

sorokod 6y ago

I remember it as a ponderous resource hog.

rufus_foreman 6y ago
"First, you'll have to consider the prerequisites, which are pretty significant, particularly for RAM. You'll need Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 or OS/2 Warp V4, an SVGA display, and, IBM says, 32MB of RAM (with 48MB recommended), at least 45MB of free disk space for the software (with an additional 30MB free disk space for swapping), and lastly, an unzip program" I think 32MB would have been about what a typical desktop would have come with in 1997, so yeah, it was a hog. I remember my manager buying extra memory for us and having us install it ourselves because he didn't want to wait for IT.
- soonnow 6y ago
  God we used it with the IBM San Francisco framework, which was trying to model every business interaction in the world. Too say it was abstract would be an understatement. Because it was so generic it didn't just have an amount attached to an transaction, instead it modeled a Money object that had a currency object. I'm sure it was well done to some degree, but loading that framework into Visual Age absolutely killed the poor 2000 era machine.

nathanwallace 6y ago

Fun fact ... "VisualAge for Java was implemented in Smalltalk and the Team facility used ENVY/Developer under the hood" [1]. Of course eventually that product and team morphed into Eclipse. I was lucky enough to play as small part as a college-age intern working at an Object Technology International [2] Lab in Sydney. I soaked in the pair programming, watching the screen flash by. I read every book they gave me (e.g. The Toyota Way, this was before XP / Agile books existed). I was amazed they actually paid me to work on these problems. I was so proud to make contributions and still remember fondly the hand-drawn diagram of the architecture passed down like a relic through the team. I am still inspired by their passion and commitment to delivery. I definitely would not be the person I am today without the career defining experience working for Adrian Cho [3] and Dave Thomas [4] during that time. Periods like that are rare in a career - grab them if you can! 1 - https://paulhammant.com/2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/ https://paulhammant.com/2017/09/01/smalltalk-envy/ 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Technology_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Technology_Internationa... 3 - https://www.adriancho.com/ https://www.adriancho.com/ 4 - https://www.davethomas.net/ https://www.davethomas.net/

rzzzt 6y ago
Eclipse used the same "running man" icon for the "run" command until version 2.0, IIRC.
maire 6y ago
Erich Gamma worked for Object Technology when VisualAge was being developed so using XP/Agile before the XP book does not surprise me. I worked with Erich before Visual Age when he developed the Presentation Framework. He came up with a process identical to XP. When XP came out I realized that Erich and Kent Beck were friends. Erich is so prolific that he doesn't remember everything he invented. He is also generous.
- osipov 6y ago
  Erich is also one of the Gang of Four, the authors of the Design Patterns book. The fact that IBM did not recognize him as a Fellow and let him leave for Microsoft tell you a lot about why IBM's stock is in the gutter.

pdevr 6y ago

I was lucky to see and work with this IDE in a real project, long after it stopped "existing". The company had code written using Visual Age, and it needed to be ported out of it. Wasn't too bad, considering how old it was. Now I look at VS Code (Disclaimer: I haven't looked at the source code of Electron), and there doesn't seem to be much innovation visually. Most IDEs seem to follow the layout of websites - a left sidebar, a main section, and an optional right sidebar, with a footer. Note: If someone here builds a different UI for IDEs, I will be an enthusiastic beta tester. Behind the user interfaces, a lot of things have changed for the better. Integration with other tools in the DevOps pipeline, ability to test quickly, autocomplete tools that understand frameworks, technologies and even contexts - all that has happened behind the scenes.

madhadron 6y ago
> If someone here builds a different UI for IDEs, I will be an enthusiastic beta tester. The interface you're seeing is still alive and well in most Smalltalk environments. If you're on Windows, try Dolphin Smalltalk, which is now available for free.
amitp 6y ago
https://gtoolkit.com/ https://gtoolkit.com/ looks different from most IDEs I've seen, but I haven't tried it yet.

WoodenChair 6y ago

An aside to this specific product, but unfortunately IMHO we have gone backwards in terms of being able to visually layout GUIs (at least in the mainstream). Regardless of the other merits of modern ecosystems, in terms of purely visual layout of GUIs (WYSIWYG with drag & drop mouse interface IOW) I think: - '90s/'00s Java IDEs > Modern Java IDEs - Dreamweaver/Frontpage > Fast Refresh Cycle - Visual Basic > Modern .NET - Interface Builder > SwiftUI

pjmlp 6y ago
Visual Basic == VB.NET with Windows Forms It isn't flashy, but it is still there. Did a project on it in 2016. Not that long ago.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dvdkon 6y ago
I think the demise of WYSIWYG GUI builders was partly just it "going out of fashion", but also partly because of rising requirements for dynamic GUIs, meaning actually changing the layout programatically, but also things like arbitrary resizing and dynamically switching based on device type ("responsive" design). All of the popular 90s RAD design tools dealt with resizing as an afterthought, which made them obsolete in many cases and probably contributed negatively to the reputation of the whole class of software. Today's WYSISYG tools (I'd say as early as mid 2000s or even before) have certainly rectified these early mistakes, but I guess fashion moved on by then.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Motif, Windows Forms, WPF, Swing all support responsive design via layout managers, and the tools do support them. And there are such tools for Web development as well, however they are oriented for the target market that actually pays for such kind of tooling, for example https://www.outsystems.com/ https://www.outsystems.com/

pulse7 6y ago

I still have the original VisualAge for Java installation CD. Came from Smalltalk and wanted to have a similar IDE for Java. After initial releases IBM didn't make any new version for a long time... they built the Eclipse in "stealth mode" and released it as open-source... and made VisualAge for Java obsolete...

alblue 6y ago
Me too :-) https://twitter.com/alblue/status/1266322655604588544?s=20 https://twitter.com/alblue/status/1266322655604588544?s=20 I interviewed Mike Milinkovich about the VAJ->Eclipse transition in 2013: https://www.infoq.com/interviews/Milinkovich-past-present-future-Eclipse/ https://www.infoq.com/interviews/Milinkovich-past-present-fu...

chopete3 6y ago

VA for Java would have survived much longer had it not make a fundamental mistake. The complete project data, UI, configuration, classes, files, etc.,) was stored in a single file. That file appeared more like a database file. That helped it show errors in realtime, keep the project always accurate, and screen transitions slick. It was difficult for multiple developers to work in a single project. It was around the same time source control systems were becoming workplace tools and the concept of multiple developers working on a single file. In those days, it was not still possible for multiple developers (Visual SourceSafe) to work on a single file at a time

nfrankel 6y ago
Definitely. I used it at my job and the registry (as it was called) was saved on a Windows network drive. As you can imagine, sometimes the network was not so reliable and the registry became corrupted. We had to copy the one of another developer and lost all our work in the process. Fun times!
projektfu 6y ago
There were a few, e.g. StarTeam and CVS, that allowed concurrent development and merging.
nathanwallace 6y ago
True. It was an incredibly powerful model, but developers like files they can see. I mentioned in my earlier comment a "hand-drawn diagram of the architecture" - it was in fact a picture of the exact layout of this database including all the pointer blocks etc between the classes, methods, versions, etc. One project I did was to convert that file format & pointer model to support larger database sizes of 16GB (IIRC). Fun exploring and updating that code. For testing I built a massive fake DB with random classes, methods, etc. The crazy thing was when that fake repo zipped down to almost nothing because it had so much repetition in the names!
EdwardCoffin 6y ago
IBM Smalltalk was perfectly usable for multiple developers. Didn't VA Java just use the ENVY version control from the underlying Smalltalk system? I'm sure they could have.

nfrankel 6y ago

Funny to see that. I used it 20 years ago. Now I definitely feel my age...

mastazi 6y ago

Page seems to be temporarily down. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210123172552/https://www.tug.ca/articles/Volume13/V13N1/V13N1_Jenkins_VisualAge-for-Java.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210123172552/https://www.tug.c...

rufus_foreman 6y ago
There's a "Contact the Web Master" link. Also from 1997.

throwawayForMe2 6y ago

I very much enjoyed VA for Java. We were using Smalltalk with Gemstone for a number of years, but the internet and Java killed the Smalltalk industry, so we migrated everything to Java using VA for Java and early Websphere. VA for Java hid the idea of source files and gave a good illusion of a dynamic and “live” Smalltalk-like environment. Later moving to eclipse was the end of that illusion and any Smalltalk feel. Added: we also had no problem with version control in Smalltalk or Java, both tool sets provided great team tools

tluyben2 6y ago

It was great and well ahead of it's time. The wonky part was the db storage.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> 32MB of RAM I have 32 GB now and IntelliJ still struggles to keep up...