Symantec aims for enterprise with Java development tool

San Francisco (July 28, 1998) — Symantec Corp. said today that it plans to ship later this year an Enterprise Suite edition of its Visual Café for Java, a version of its popular development tool that the company says makes it easier and faster to build Java applications for use in large, distributed networks.

The product builds on capabilities in Symantec’s Visual Café for Java product and allows developers to build distributed applications — so-called because they run on multiple, often geographically dispersed computers — as if they were writing an application for a single machine, according to Symantec. Symantec terms this new generation of tools ERAD — enterprise rapid application development.

Visual Café for Java, Enterprise Suite, is the first of a promised new generation of tools Symantec is using to attract developers who work in large distributed environments.

The product allows developers to write software applications, including database applications, entirely in Java, rather than having to write them in both Java and the database-specific language SQL (structured query language), Symantec said.

The tool will also work with forthcoming technology in Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Java Developers Kit, including Enterprise JavaBeans, Symantec said. JavaBeans are small software programs that can be combined and distributed over many computers on a network.

But the product’s main selling point is the time it can save developers in writing and debugging applications for use in large, cross-platform environments, according to Symantec.

In the past, developers who built for such environments had to track and build each piece of their application by physically going from computer to computer to check for compatibility across platforms. The development tool announced today attempts to solve that problem by automatically tracking each piece of a distributed application as it is built, and doing so from one location, so the developer sees the application as a single image instead of in fragmented parts, Symantec said.

One analyst said writing applications in Java may simplify certain “sticky issues” in other programming languages. But Symantec has overstated the ease with which developers can write distributed applications using Java, said Larry Perlstein, a principal analyst with Dataquest Inc.

The tool is suitable for use across multiple platforms and virtual machines, including Sun’s Solaris, Hewlett-Packard Co.’s HP/UX, IBM Corp.’s AIX, and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows NT. It also allows interoperability between different applications, regardless of the language their logic or objects are written in, whether Java, C++, Cobol, or other development languages, Symantec said.

Pricing for Visual Café for Java, Enterprise Suite, will be announced when the product ships, which is expected to be in the fourth quarter of 1998.