The past, present, and future of the Java Development environment

-->On March 23, 1995, San Jose Mercury News published an article titled "Why Sun thinks hot Java'll give you a lift", which predicts that Java technology will be the next major event, a prediction that does not now seem It was just a business propaganda ploy, though the article was written by Lisa Poulson, the PR manager of Sun. From the moment the world knows about Java, it's been ten years since the beginning of time, and there are many things worth summarizing in the past ten years, but here I just want to talk about some personal thoughts about the Java development environment and communicate with my friends.

Today's software developers are likely to use a wide variety of development tools to complete relatively complex development tasks as needed throughout the software development lifecycle, and decades ago, people were only using text editors, compilers, and debugger for development, For this stage of the development environment people call Cles (Command line environments). IDEs (Integrated Development environments) appears when people find that if they can effectively improve their development efficiency by integrating those separate development tools. Although the advent of Java is only ten years, its development environment is also great to go through the three stages from Cles to Ides to Xdes, and now is about to enter the cdes phase. In the development of the Java development environment mentioned above, there are many places that we should pay attention to.

　　A historical review of the Java Development environment

Throughout the last decade, the development of the Java development environment can be roughly divided into the following phases:

1995, Command line development environment Cles
1996-2000, integrated development Environment IDES
2001-2004, expand development environment Xdes
Since the date of the CDEs, collaborative development environment

1995, an extraordinary year, this year Java has been successful. It is embarrassing that in 1995 years there is no satisfactory Java development environment, developers in Java programming, most of the use of a text editor to edit the source program, and then use the command line to compile processing. The Java development environment at that time was still in the cles era, and the development efficiency was very low, indicating a fierce competition in Java development tools.

Some call 1996 the year of the Internet, some call it the Java year, others call it a web development year, but whatever it is called the 1996, it reflects the fact that Bill Joy has succeeded in combining Java with the Internet. The year of September Sun launched its Java development environment-java WorkShop, this is a browser-based Java development tool, but because Java in many ways is not mature, so in fact, Java WorkShop is not successful, published the same year Symantec Visual Cafe is much better at performance and maturity than workshop, because it is developed using the C + + language. The reference to Visual Cafe could not be Eugene Wang, because Eugene Wang was often the same person who appeared at the same time as the word computer spy, and some even said that when Symantec's boss Gordon Eubanks signed with Eugene Wang, Also signed a unit in the prison. Visual Cafe is the main planning by Eugene Wang, it is in the same year published in the Java Development environment, the only solution with the database connectivity problems of the development environment, with a set of components can be connected to the database, without too much programming use drag and drop way to do most of the work, This advantage makes visual Cafe popular with Java developers. IBM acquired the OTI company this year, thus getting a large number of software elites such as Dave Thomas's disciple John Duimovich, Dave Thomson, Mike Wilson, among other things, "developers living on technical blades," Brian Barry.

Because of the Microsoft Monopoly case in 1997, Microsoft's efforts in the Java development environment have been limited, visual Cafe because the interface is intuitive and easy to use, can easily connect a variety of data sources and other features are again welcomed by developers. This year IBM released VisualAge for Java. VisualAge for Java is a code base-oriented development environment that provides code libraries and project management to facilitate development teams in the C/s environment for project development. However, since most Java developers are familiar with the file-oriented development environment, they are not accustomed to the development of the code base, coupled with the higher visalage for Java requirements for system resources, making visualage for Java initially not recognized by Java developers.

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