Visualage

Has IBM stopped supporting VisualAge in order to support Eclipse?
[ September 23, 2003: Message edited by: Pradeep Bhat ]

Has IBM stopped supporting VisualAge in order to support Eclipse?

No, they have stopped supporting VAJ to support WSAD (the commercial equivalent of Eclipse.)

Actually, I'm not sure this is entirely accurate. Eclipse is pretty close to Visual Age for Java all by itself, with the exception of the WebSphere Test Environment. For a free open source product, it's awfully nice.
The WebSphere Studio products (which include WSSD, WSAD and for iSeries guys like me, WSDC) are all commercial packaging of Eclipse and various plugins. The functionality of these products is well beyond anything Visual Age did. The various jLpex editors for things like style sheets and JSPs, the support for WAR and EAR files, the XML editor; none of those were part of the original Visual Age offering. And the test environments, with the selection of WebSphere 4/5 or Tomcat, are very powerful (especially since you can set breakpoints in your JSPs).
I'd say that IBM realized VAJ had reached the end of its life. They took everything they had learned and built a new extendable framework that did most of what VAJ did, and released that framework into the Open Source community (this was no small investment, either - IBM reportedly spent about $40 million on Eclipse development prior to its release). At the same time, IBM build a lot of great plugins to the Eclipse framework, and that's how they hope to recoup their investment.
I think both Eclipse and WebSphere Studio have target audiences, neither one of which would have been met by the aging, rigid structure of VAJ. And this is from a long time VAJ fan... I used to teach VAJ back in the previous millenium

.
Joe

Didn't know there were people (at least outside of IBM) who actually liked Visual Age (or Visual AIDS as wel turned to calling it).
In my experience that bug riddled monstrosity only slowed us down (it was forced upon us by upper management who purchased anything IBM built site unseen and made it corporate standard).
The code repository (while in theory a nice idea) was so fragile we had to resort to making a full backup of the database (we had it running on DB/2) several times a day in order to prevent us loosing too much work when it got corrupted again beyond recovery (which happened several times a week).

Your experience was completely different than mine. I used VAJ for years and while it crashed occasionally on early releases, I almost never had a problem in VAJ35. The rare occasions when it did lock up, I simply restarted the program and it rebuilt itself. That was a long process, but not terrible. The cross-referencing in particular was a great help to me, and the WebSphere Test Environment was simply unbeatable for debugging servlet.
Joe

Could be related to version indeed. We used 2.0 and 3.0 before I quit the project (which by now should be either completed or cancelled, most likely the former).
Apart from the stability my main gripe with VAJ has always been the rigidity of the generated code. Coming from a Delphi environment where you have true two-way editing having to use VAJ where generated code cannot be edited in any way without using some dialog or wizard is a huge culture shock and slowed me down a lot.

Originally posted by Pradeep Bhat:
Has IBM stopped supporting VisualAge in order to support Eclipse?

If you need an "official" statement of support, I can track down the exact end of service date. It's true that Studio is IBM's strategic premier application development platform, however IBM is generally reluctant to "pull the plug" on a product while there is lingering customer interest. In general, support ends a year or two after a replacement product is available, but there are always exceptions.
Metacomment: I should know, I worked on IBM VisualAge Smalltalk years ago and its demise has been predicted since the mid-90's (cue Monty Python's "Bring out your dead!"

) . It still has a loyal following and a fully staffed development / service department. I see no indicator that will change in the foreseeable future. Just looked at IBM VisualAge for Smalltalk... what did I tell you. VisualAge Smalltalk V6.0 service extended - Dec. 2005. Great for customers, drives developers and service folks crazy. However, there is one difference -- VA/ST has no follow-on equivalent offering. But I digress...
-- Dan