RE: Visual Age for Java

Based on Eric's statement, I just decided to give WebSphere Studio a shot
for website development (this is something nice and simple, my
www.plutabrothers.com site, which is primarily static pages with a tiny bit
of JavaScript thrown in).  I must say I didn't have a whole lot of
confidence, even though I love Visual Age for Java.  IBM has a history of
creating tools that are veryu powerful but difficult to use.  As expected,
the number of options was a little daunting, and parts of the setup were not
intuitive.  But I must report fairly that, in about an hour, I was able to
import my website, make a few changes here and there (primarily fixing bad
grammar that FrontPage allowed to slip by), and update it with almost no
problems (by far the least intuitive thing was setting the system up to
publish to a mapped directory on my IFS).

Not only that, once that preliminary work was done, the capabilities of WSS
are much more integrated.  If I have a linked style sheet, I can see it as
an object, bring it up, and edit each style individually.  The styles are
further broken down into their individual properties, and the properties are
each editable with a nice graphical interface.  This sort of drilldown seems
to exist throughout the product, and indicates a lot of attention  to
detail.  This is not simply a beefed up word processor, a la FrontPage, but
seems instead to really understand the various relationships of web
publishing.

The JavaScript editor ALMOST had me thrilled - until I realized that it
really wasn't going to be much help in editing external .js files.

I haven't tried integrating servlets yet, but as far as this portion goes,
I'm quite impressed.  The only disadvantage so far is that the "Normal" view
editing isn't quite as intuitive as FrontPage, but that's simply a matter of
being used to FrontPage.  WSS is much more powerful, and I think I'll get
used to it fairly quickly.

Joe

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