RE: Support of Visual Age...

VAJ is, I believe, slated for the junk heap in 2004 so it will be around
for awhile.  When I said that WSAD has all of the features of VAJ, that
wasn't quite right.  At the moment, WSAD is designed for server-side
development.  This means that it doesn't have VCE and, AFAIK, this is
not planned.  I think IBM is hoping that some third party will step
forward and provide this.  I never used VCE anyway, so I wasn't too
focused on that.

Also, some of the tools like EAB and the Persistence Builder have not
yet been ported to WSAD.  I believe that this is planned for the near
future.  However, I don't use these either so this isn't critical on my
list.

The look and feel are (is?) really not that different from VAJ and are
very intuitive.  You will pick it up in under a day, if not under an
hour.  The menus are logically organized and the help is pretty good.
The usual buttons are all there and things are more logical.  When doing
EJB development in VAJ, I never could figure out which icon was which on
the home and remote interfaces, for example, with the little arrows
going in various directions.  WSAD uses R and H for the remote and home
interfaces which I find much easier.

There are several usability issues in Eclipse 1.0.  Don't get me wrong,
it's not perfect.  But I have seen all of these issues addressed and 2.0
looks very friendly.  For example, one thing I really liked in VAJ is
the ability to double click on a method and have that method pop up in a
separate window which I could access with alt+tab.  This isn't there in
Eclipse 1.0.  But I know that this sort of thing is discussed and being
addressed in 2.0.

A large percentage of the Eclipse/WSAD developers were VAJ users so
they're very familiar with the issues involved.

Gary

> -----Original Message-----
> From: java400-l-admin@midrange.com
> [mailto:java400-l-admin@midrange.com] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
> Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 10:26 AM
> To: java400-l@midrange.com
> Subject: RE: Support of Visual Age...
>
>
> > From: jpcarr@tredegar.com
> >
> > That's not quite right.  VAJava is not going away,  The development
> > environment is being made more coherent with Eclipse.  You now get
> > EVERYthing (all compilers, the Web Tools including VAJava) with the
> > iSeries now.
> >
> > I think it is a huge misnomer to think that VAJava is going
> away.   It was
> > a standalone function before and was very crudely integrated with
> > WebSphere development tools for example.
>
> John, when I talked to the tools development folks at COMMON,
> they specifically said that Visual Age for Java would no
> longer be supported, but that "much of the functionality"
> would be included in the new Eclipse-based workbench.  In
> other words the new IDE would be compatible with VAJ.
>
> There are two levels of compatibility: functional and access.
>  You can have the same functions, but if they require
> radically different keystrokes and menus to access them, then
> you will still have to relearn much of what you know.
>
> As far as I know, compatibility between the products will be
> functional at best, and even that won't be 100%, although
> Gary Peskin's posts lead me to believe that they're at least
> trying to keep the same functionality.
>
> However, the look and feel and the access will likely be very
> different from what we're used to with VAJ.  If you've heard
> different, I'd be happy to hear it.
>
> Joe