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Four Java Development Suites Promote Teamwork continued
February 8, 1999

Testing Java Development Environments

To test these four Java packages, we developed two real-life applications. During our tests we looked for characteristics such as ease of use, ability to support large-scale and group development, integration with source-code-control systems, JavaBeans support, database connectivity and general networking features.

The first application that we created reads a binary file of arbitrary format and writes it to a delimited text file. The application allows the user to specify the different fields in the binary file. Every field can be assigned a starting offset within the file, length in bytes, type of field (character or integer, for example) and a description.

Information is entered into a grid for the user to check/ uncheck which fields to include in the output. This let us test file I/O in both text and binary, test many different aspects of the user interface under Java, work with JavaBeans, archive and deploy projects, implement JDBC connectivity and examine the products' debuggers. The application generated any combination of the following three outputs--a delimited text file, an HTML output with tables or a database table using JDBC--as requested by the user.

The second application was an applet that ran within a Web browser (we used the latest releases of both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator). The applet connected to the database using JDBC, ran SQL statements (mainly SELECT fields FROM table WHERE condition) and displayed the results to the end user.

Another version of the applet read the delimited text file generated by the test application and displayed it within an HTML table. Features such as JavaBeans generation and integration with other technologies (ActiveX, for instance) that could not be tested using our applications were instead analyzed individually using smaller tests.

In addition, not all functionality was available in all packages. For example, Visual Café ships with dbAnywhere middleware, which we used for JDBC connectivity. We had to use the JDBC-ODBC bridge when testing the other IDEs.