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Java Studio Creator

By Allen Holub

August 15, 2005 — (Page 1 of 3)
I’ve been spending the past day or so fooling around with Sun’s new Java Studio Creator, and this column gives my first impression. (I reserve the right to change my mind once I’ve worked with it more.)

At the risk of putting Descartes before da Horace, I’ll start with my conclusion: There’s so much wrong with this product that it’s hard to figure out where to begin.

Java Studio Creator is one of a long line of products that started out with Microsoft’s “Visual” tools, circa 1985. Microsoft had come up with a miserable “foundation-class” library (Microsoft Foundation Classes) that nobody could use to build real applications. Once you got past the executive-demo stage, MFC was very difficult to program, buggy and not really up to the task. It took months of study to get good at MFC programming, and systems built with MFC were far from robust. I know of several projects (Sun’s original AWT library was one) that were simply discarded and rewritten using the underlying Windows APIs because MFC proved so ungainly.

The Microsoft solution was unfortunate. Rather than replace the library with something more reasonable, Microsoft chose to wrap it. Microsoft built a series of “wizards” that wrote bad code for you. In fact, since it was machine-generated, the actual program—at the source-code level—was even worse than it would have been had you built it by hand. At least you didn’t have to look at it.

Java Studio Creator follows in Microsoft’s footsteps. Sun has put so much PR hype into the J2EE APIs that it can’t really admit that these APIs are flawed. Like Microsoft, Sun has provided a tool that writes hideously overcomplex code for you so you don’t have to do it yourself. I’d rather write good code to a good API than wrap a bad API with machine-generated code that I can’t understand. (Let’s hope they’ll fix some of the problems with the existing APIs in future versions of Java.)

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