What is Symantec Visual Café?

Visual Café was the RealBasic of Java on Mac.  It brought structured and visual Java RAD (Rapid Application Development) to Mac and PC developpers.

From AlamoPC.org :

Visual Cafe is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool, which means you can put much of your program together using drag and drop procedures. As you drag and drop away, Visual Cafe is busy in the background writing and updating your program. Remarkably, you can then open the source code Visual Cafe has written for your program, make some changes, and you'll see them immediately reflected in the design window. 

 Drag and drop programming is nothing new; Visual Basic and Delphi programmers have been doing this for years. But Visual Cafe provides an excellent implementation of this approach for Java, and has several noteworthy features. The first is a large library of pre-built components that you can add to your program. In addition to the usual buttons, scroll bars, dialogs, etc., there are a number of more elaborate components which are very useful: a calendar control, data input controls formatted for telephone numbers, zip codes, etc., HTML links, and multimedia components for playing sound, displaying images, animations, or even a slide show. Visual Cafe includes several cute animations such as a fireworks display and text that bounces around. 

 Another interesting aspect of Visual Cafe is its support for "interactions." These are connections between two or more controls on your design form. For example, suppose you wish to design a simple slide show. You first place the three components on the form: the slide show, the previous button, and the next button. You then modify the properties as appropriate, such as typing in the label "Previous" and "Next" for the two buttons, and telling the slide show which graphic files to use. To make each button work, you add an interaction. This simply involves drawing a line from a button to the slide show component, and answering a few questions in the wizard that pops up. Voila! A working slide show applet without having to write a single line of code! 

 The only downside to interactions is that while you can create them visually, to update or delete them you must manually edit the generated source code. This seems counterintuitive in such a visual product, as almost everything else you create visually can be updated and deleted visually. 

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Unless you're already familiar with the conventions of a state-of-the-art object-oriented approach, Java can be a daunting language to learn. A good place to start is Symantec’s Visual Cafe 1.0, a visual programming tool that takes a unique approach to creating Java applets. In contrast to the more traditional text-editor-style programming environment of Symantec’s Cafe DR1 (see Reviews, October 1996), Visual Cafe lets you design applets simply by dragging ready-made components from a library into a window.

Visual programming tools for the Mac have had limited success in the past, but Visual Cafe’s prospects are better: it will be used mostly to add visual elements to Web pages, a task for which dragging and dropping objects is a perfect match of form to function. Programming scientific numerics in Visual Cafe would be an ordeal, but plugging a scrolling banner into a Web page, a likely use for Java, is a snap.

Besides making it easy to drag and drop the vibrating orange text and other flashy visuals we’ve come to expect on the Web, Visual Cafe offers tools for doing more pedestrian work-order forms, catalogs, site directories, database queries, and so forth. Preformatted text fields for zip codes, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers — along with tools for adding links, dialog boxes, windows, and frames — save Java programmers from much of the tedium of formatting.

Visual Cafe also simplifies the chore of specifying interactions between interface elements by means of the Interaction Assistant, which lets you choose functions from a dialog box and assign them to buttons you drag into a window or frame. When you see the volume of text your seemingly simple choices produce, you’ll be glad the Assistant did the work for you. And when you see the amazing number of classes and objects involved in generating even the simplest applets, you’ll be glad Visual Cafe gives you a hierarchical class browser; it’s a great way to navigate the wilderness of components you’ll amass after only a few days of programming.

If you want faster results than the traditional “Hello, world” programming approach can offer, Visual Cafe is an ideal tool for “borrowing” code. For example, if you find third-party code on the Web or Cafe’s built-in tools to be almost, but not quite, what you need, you can use the Property List to modify them just by changing a few values (see “Public Property”). You can also make the modifications in straight-text Java from the standard programmer’s editing window.

The only clouds in Cafe’s sunny skies are the kinds of glitches typical of beta software. Most of the problems have to do with memory allocation: Cafe displays nonsense out-of-memory errors and crashes when virtual memory is turned on; the solution is to run the program with at least 24MB of RAM. Thanks to some minor incompatibilities with Sun’s original Java specification, some Web-downloaded applets run oddly or simply crash.

The Last Word

Visual Cafe is, at least for beginners, the most entertaining and productive Java package available. It’s a work in but whether you’re creating applets from scratch or tinkering with the Web’s abundant Java examples, this is a great set of tools.

Seiter, Charles. (May 1997). Visual Cafe. Macworld. (pg. 67).

Download Symantec Visual Café for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC

At least 24MB of RAM

Mac OS 7.5 - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver