IBM VisualAge for Java for Linux

Locutus writes "IBM is said to announce at JavaOne that they are working on VisualAge for Java on Linux and are looking at a 4th quarter release date. This is a really amaizing development IDE for Java (editor could use some work though). Now if BlackDown can just get the JIT crank'n faster we will be styling. Here is the news article: VisualAge for Java on Linux "

Comments

If its a full port, I can't wait...

[BigD42]

I have done a lot of work with VAJava for NT and AIX and find it to be a good IDE. Good is very relative, since I still prefer Emacs and an xterm. Anyway, back to the point.

The best part of the VAJava IDE is the High Performance Toolkit. This allows Java classes to be compiled into native code libraries that, like classes, are dynanmicly loaded. The performance is far beyond that of any JIT compilier and you don't have to lose the flexibility of java classes. There are some major complaints with the software (mostly lack of virtual machine control and release-to-release binary compatability) but its very promising. Personal experience places a JIT compiler at around 1/3 the speed of C in many applications (Networking, file seeking, data crunching, etc) The High Performance code runs around 1/2 the speed of C. This would be very helpful since I use Java on very CPU intensive personal projects. Hopefully they can work out the kinks if it is incorporated into VAJava for Linux

Some URLs for the above

[Rayban]

For the lazy:

HotSpot Performance Engine:

http://java.sun.com/products/hotspot/

Developer Connection:

http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/index.ht ml
(you'll have to sign up)

This is a good thing.

[SoftwareJanitor]

Visual Age for Java is the preferred Java development tool where I work. This will be another great opportunity for me to advocate and use Linux at work.

Despite some people's opinions, Java is far from dead. Now that the hype has died down, businesses are switching to it for use as a primary enterprise development language. Applets aren't really even that important. We are using it more for Servelets and full fledged applications.

Contrary to what some people also say, write once, run anywhere is not that difficult. I've written Java apps that run fine on Solaris, NT and Linux.

Also in my experience Java performance is not that bad, especially when you consider that most uses of it are for things that would have otherwise been done in either (ick) Visual Basic or PowerBuilder (both of which are as slow or slower than Java for most things and neither offers anywhere near the cross-platform capability of Java). Sure, its no competitor in speed to C or C++, but how hard is it to write a complex (something that is over 50,000 lines of code, uses multithreading, a GUI, etc) C or C++ program that is multiplatform? I know from experience it isn't easy, it can be done, but it isn't easy and it isn't usually pretty. Multiple *nix variants and Linux are no problem, but it is no fun to make something run on standard platforms and also on Windows due to poor standards adherence in most Windows C/C++ compilers. Porting stuff to the Mac isn't much better because while the basics of the compilers there seems reasonably robust, their standard library implementations seem quite weak and the Toolbox works quite differently from Win32 SDK or the POSIX API.

All that being said, I wouldn't advocate Java for everything. I like and use C, C++ and Perl for lots of things also, but people who want to poo-pooh Java just because it isn't the latest thing just seem to me like they are deluded. I've seem to many things dismissed for dead too quickly while they slowly build acceptance for me to believe it that easily.

Visual Age? Aieee! No No No No!!!

[Greg W.]

If IBM's Visual Age for Java is anything at all like IBM's Visual Age for Smalltalk, you don't want it anywhere near your computer! VAST is far and away the worst commercial program I've ever had the profound displeasure not to be able to avoid installing; it is worse than Microsoft Windows.

• VAST uses a graphical install program, so you need X. But wait! That's not bad enough... it doesn't work with anything but the AIX X server, so you can't install it from the PC on your desk. But wait! That's not bad enough, either... it requires CDE. You can't install VAST on a vanilla AIX X workstation -- you've got to install CDE on it just to install Smalltalk.
• The VAST installation program is written in Smalltalk. During the installation there are two es. processes that get spawned. They busy-look throughout the whole installation process -- they'll easily chew up an hour or two of CPU time. Most unimpressive. Not to mention the untidiness of all those trailing dots.... "./install." indeed.
• On the AIX box, someone has to start up a daemon. This daemon requires a parameter which is a "device number". You get this device number by running another of the VAST programs, which prints the device number on stdout along with some text. So why couldn't the daemon just run this secondary program itself? Yeah, I wrote a simple shell script wrapper to do this, but why should I have had to do this -- this is version 4.5 of a commercial app!
• The security is atrocious. In order to stop this daemon, you have to supply the password of the person who started it. That's right -- geteuid() be damned, it won't know I'm root unless I give it root's password. There are two ways you can give it the password -- either as a parameter on the command line, or interactively on /dev/tty. So if you want to stop this daemon at system shutdown time, you either have to embed the password in cleartext in a script, or hire some chimpanzees to make sure VAST is manually stopped before the system is rebooted. I find this completely unacceptable.
• Oh, you actually wanted to use Smalltalk? Well, there are bugs galore, and you get to install patches for them. But these patches aren't distributed as standard AIX fileset packages -- oh no, you get to manually move files around and extract tarballs. So, when you ask the AIX package manager what version is installed, it can only tell you the base version, not the actual patch level. I can only conclude that the people responsible for VAST don't know beans about AIX, and think it's just some complex Windoze box.
• And of course, you get to type the magic symbols from your secret decoder ring to unlock it. This is one of those licensed products with a built-in enforcer....

Unless IBM can demonstrate to me that VAJava is going to be developed by a completely different group of people than the ones who inflicted VAST upon the world, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop this abomination from dirtying Linux's good name.

Re:Linux vs. NT Performance Comparisons?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they do, then it has nothing to do with NT or Linux. I've found the JDK, as shipped by SUN with Symantec's JIT, to be much slower than blackdown's port with Tya ( a freeware JIT that can be obtained from the blackdown home page, which I'd say is about 1.5 times faster as a very rough guess). I don't know what other JIT's exist out there for NT, and how they perform.

But I do know that it would be stupidity for the NT peole to claim a victory over Linux because they have a great JIT that has not (yet) been ported to Linux. It reminds me of the Mindcraft retardation: use the same damn web server on both Linux and NT if you want to compare the OS's. Otherwise your comparing webservers, not Linux and NT. Any idiot can tell you that IE4 will beat Apache. It seems many idiots, however, construe this as a success on the part of NT (the OS).

Don't fall into the same trap on this issue...

Sun's High-performance JIT

[Rayban]

If you want really nice performance under most platforms, take a look at the HotSpot JIT compiler. They say it's about 3-5x faster running stuff.

As well, there's a release candidate for the rewritten java compiler which simply kicks butt. It's orders of magnitude faster.

Get HotSpot from java.sun.com (link is on the front page) and join the Developers section (free) to get javac-ea (Early-Access compiler). It's worth the downloads...

Re:The tools are cool - its Java that needs work

[Anonymous Coward]

Gosh, I haven't seen such idiotic claims in my entire life.

You comments are so wrong that I wonder if you really have been doing serious development. The only "slow" aspect of modern Java VMs is Swing/Java2D.

Are you even aware of how much Web development is done in Java or other VM based languages and NOT in C/C++?

Let's put it this way. My company has an server-side Java product that handles 10x the number of concurrent users than the nearest C++ competitor on the same hardware simply because of superior multithreaded design. Even the *JAVA WEB SERVER* can handle more concurrent connections than Apache, which poops out at around 120+ concurrent connections.


Second of all, Java is far from dead. Sheesh, almost all new development except in a few specialized areas is being done in Java.
Especially, most server-side code. Every new W3C standard is prototyped in Java first. John Carmack has written all his new Quake3 support tools in Java, etc. No one is going to seriously challenge traditional C/C++ office applications, because the market isn't worth it. Only in new areas of development do you see new languages being used.

Eiffel blows away C++ too, but no one has written a killer app in it. That doesn't mean there's someting wrong with it.


I don't know how many times I have to keep explaining this to the macho C morons, but scalability has *nothing* to do with raw CPU execution speed (which JITs handle quit well). Transforming polygons yes, rendering database results, no. Raw CPU is the lowest determiner of scalability. The CPU spends the vast majority of its time waiting on memory, bus, network and disk i/o.

If you want to be scalable, consume as little state and disk as possible.

C++ falls flat on its face for server-side programming. It takes 10x as long to do the same thing in Java/JSP, and you still end up having to track down null pointers and memory leaks. That's why eBay and Onsale have more downtime than scripting oriented sites, because scripting languages are VM based and handle automatic memory reclaimation and shield the programmer for GPFs. eBay died because of a C++ memory leak.

Perl is great for text processing (I've been programming perl for 5 years), but its lack of static type checking makes it poor for team based
projects. If you're the only coder, fine.
Perl is also slower than Java.


The fact of the matter is, for the forseeable future, server-side languages are going to be high level 4GLs and VM based languages, NOT C++.

C/C++ are a resource drain on any IT department. Why the fuck does an intranet app to process forms have to be coded in a bug-happy language like C++, when a VB, Tcl, Perl, Python, or Java programmer can do it quicker, with less resources.

C++ is an IT resource drain for most companies. Money down the hole on programmers who spend extra time on bug tracking bullshit.

Which is why 99.9% of all CGIs are written in ASP, Cold Fusion, Perl ,Python, Java, TCL, or PHP, and *NOT* C/C++.


You might claim VM's are a dumb idea, but the fact of the matter is, most of the code being written in the world is being written for VMs.
The number of lines of VB code alone would dwarf C++.


Did you ever think that maybe your application was slow because you don't know how to code in Java? jEdit is an emacs clone in Java that is lightning quick on my P166. However, there are plenty of similar Java editors that are dog slow.

Java doesn't automatically make an inefficient programmer more efficient.

Best language I've never used.

[Synn]

Started with Java a few years back and I really love the language.



I've just never seen an application for it.

Dunno if Sun helped kill it, or if the hype outshined it's ability. But as a web application developer I've found zero use for Java.

PHP3, Perl and stock html are the only way to go.

I don't mean to bash Java the language, I just really would have liked to have seen it go from being Sun's Java to a Useful Java.



Anyway, if you're into Java and have never used Visual Age I'd _highly_ recommend it.

I've used just about all the Java IDE's and VAJ was the best when it came to glueing together applications visually.

You can wire buttons to text boxes that take input from function calls on other visual elements(like a select box), all without editing code.

Very nice. Get's you into the mindset of writing independant functions and just visual pulling them together.

Only down side was that IBM took their sweet time keeping up with the Java revs.