DDJ Visual Tools July/August 1996


Features

Visual Development Tools for Java

by Steve V. Yalovitser

Steve shares his experiences working with a trio of Java visual-development environments-Rogue Wave's JFactory, Symantec's Cafe, and Autodesk's HyperWire.

Visual Installation

by Al Williams

Al uses Sax Software's Setup Wizard to set up a multimedia training tool. He then takes a peek at Eschalon's Setup Pro, Jetstream's InstallWizard, and InstallShield's Express Professional.

Writing Delphi Components

by William Stamatakis

A Delphi component is simply a class with some value-added features for representing the class, and for manipulating attributes of the class. Bill shows you how to create a component that can be used in any Delphi application.

The Libero Development Environment

by Pieter Hintjens

Libero is a language-independent visual-development environment that lets you design programs as state diagrams. Pieter uses Perl with Libero to develop an HTML preprocessor.

Image Processing and Visual Basic

by Don Parrish

Don details his favorite tricks for squeezing more performance out of Visual Basic when using it for image plotting. His techniques improve disk access and image quality.

Adding Power to PowerBuilder

by Baylor Wetzel

Baylor presents an awk-like PowerBuilder nonvisual user object for string parsing that provides integration with databases and graphical objects.

COLUMNS

Ramblings in Real Time

by Michael Abrash

Michael examines the three main types of 1/z span sorting, then discusses a sample 3-D app built around the technique.

DTACK Revisited

by Hal W. Hardenbergh

When it comes to tape-backup systems, it's easy to get all twisted up. Hal describes the options and features to consider when choosing a system.

20/20

by Al Williams

Al develops several cooperating Delphi programs that utilize a shared-memory component that, in turn, utilizes Win32 synchronization to keep the memory consistent.

Software and the Law

by Marc E. Brown

The U.S. Patent Office recently released guidelines for issuing patents for software and display icons. Marc analyzes those guidelines to determine what they really mean to software developers.

The Software Engineer

by Allen Holub

One of the main strengths of the object-oriented approach is that you can make changes to the structure of an object without affecting any of the code that uses the object.

Editorial

by Tim Kientzle