Visual Cafe Expert Edition 4.0

Rating:
Summary: Falling Short of Expectations
Review: I've heard so many rave reviews about Visual Cafe, however my experience with the product has been far from productive. The IDE environment is excellent with efficient links to help pages, code helpers as you type in java text, method dropdown lists, object and property lists, and an intuitive wysiwig screen editor. If you are familiar with Microsoft's VB, you should be comfortable with Visual Cafe. However there are some stability problems. The tagged sections (generated code) are fragile and often break with little help on where the error is. Finding and fixing these problems are laborious. In addition I've received Java exceptions as well as the IDE crashing when trying to generate code via the wizards. The problems are not machine related as I tried VCafe on both my home and work pc's. Tech support has been less than enthusiastic to help and generally ignores you unless you pay handsomely. Perhaps the biggest disappointment has been the Java beans for database functionality. Documentation is woefully short, the beans are not easy to customize to your taste, and the learning curve is steep even if you are an expert SQL developer.

I am disappointed because the IDE layout is excellent however the stability issues as well as the poor database related beans make me frustrated with the product. I suggest taking a serious look at Borland's product before purchasing this one.