WebGain sharpens its edge

Developing enterprise or e-commerce applications in Java can produce multiple cost- and time-saving benefits. For instance, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) components can be easily reused with different presentation technologies while a single backend database is maintained.

But going with Java has its hazards. For example, each member of the development team typically needs a different development application to match his or her area of specialization. These isolated tools often introduce duplications or errors into the programming cycle.

WebGain Studio minimizes incompatibilities and redundancies among the popular stand-alone Java programming products. Besides Visual Café for Java, which WebGain acquired from Symantec last year, WebGain Studio includes top-quality visual tools for designing EJBs, mapping EJB components to relational databases, and editing XML and HTML.

WebGain’s weak spot is that it requires you to purchase more functions than most programmers will need; it may not be a cost-effective solution for those who can turn out Java code with Visual Café alone or with another editor. But for enterprise development teams, WebGain’s graphical modeling and streamlined coding of complex database connections should pay off by shortening development cycles. That translates into lower development costs and a shorter time to market for revenue-generating Web applications, and therefore we awarded WebGain Studio 4.1 Professional Edition a score of Very Good.

WebGain Studio 4.1 is available in Standard and Professional editions. Both editions combine the Visual Café 4.1 Enterprise Edition IDE (integrated development environment), WebGain StructureBuilder 4.1 for graphically developing complex object models, the UltraDev HTML editor licensed from Macromedia, and TurboXML, a new addition licensed from Tibco Software. In addition, the WebGain Studio 4.1 Professional Edition, which we tested, adds WebGain TopLink 3.0 for linking EJBs and Java objects to databases without writing SQL query statements.

Although Visual Café 4.1 and Structure Builder have not gained any significant features since the version 4.0 release, the entire suite gains support for BEA’s WebLogic Application Sever 6.0 and Sun Microsystems’ Java Development Kit 1.3.

Visual Café and StructureBuilder are well integrated, although most of the tools in the suite remain separate. For example, after we created a visual model of a Java application in StructureBuilder, Visual Café allowed us to view the object model and Java code simultaneously. Changes that we made to the code in Visual Café were automatically reflected in the model in StructureBuilder, and vice versa.

TurboXML is an equally intuitive component. By using TurboXML to graphically represent schemas and DTDs (Document Type Definitions), we were able to significantly reduce the time needed to develop complex XML business documents. In addition, we used TurboXML’s XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) processor to convert batches of XML files using new style sheets.

TurboXML is an especially good fit for a development environment because it works with complex data structures, including Java, ODBC, COM (Component Object Model), and Cobol Copybooks. In our tests, we were able to open a Java-class file in TurboXML and specify how database fields would appear in a resulting XML document.

WebGain Studio’s TopLink helped us build database connectivity in our Java application much more easily and efficiently. Using descriptors from our Java code, the TopLink Mapping Workbench’s hierarchical tree view enabled us to associate our Java variables with fields in a SQL 7 database table. Once we finished the mapping process, we exported the project as both Java and XML files. Although most parts of WebGain Studio are not joined in a common user interface, this ability to quickly move files helped streamline our workflow and raise productivity.

We were a bit disappointed to find that WebGain Studio 4.1 ships with last year’s version of Macromedia’s tool for building dynamic, database-driven Web applications, UltraDev 1.0, but after some manual configuration we successfully employed WebGain JSP (JavaServer Pages) extensions for Dreamweaver with our current Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.0 software. Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.0 allowed us to quickly configure and check the operation of our test Java application within a JSP Webpage — a useful feature even for Java developers who don’t perform Webpage design. After noticing an error on our part, it was a smooth switch to the Visual Café source editor, where we fixed the Java scriptlets that were part of the JSP page.

WebGain Studio 4.1 Professional Edition covers practically every aspect of Java development. Not everyone will need all of this suite’s components, but enterprise developers will definitely benefit from its breadth as they face increasingly complex Java application projects that require wiring together databases, multiple delivery mechanisms, and XML document repositories.