Recently at JavaOne, on that Thursday afternoon, I was exploring the incredibly busy Exhibition Hall. As I went from one interesting demonstration to another, I came upon the Visix exhibit where I saw a demonstration of Vibe^TM 1.1. I asked Jeff Anderson, the Vibe Product Manager, and Christine Chartier to explain their product for the readers of MokaByte. They kindly obliged. Now here it is! - our very interesting conversation...

MB: Can you just launch into a talk about what is Vibe and how can it attract me since I'm a Java programmer? What can you offer me that noone else can offer me? Also just generally what does Visix do?

Jeff Anderson: Vibe is an application development environment for high-end Java programmers.

MB: Platform?

JA: The platforms we support for deployment and development include Windows, Mac OS, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Digital Unix, OS/2, Linux, Solaris, and SunOS. That's both development and deployment.

MB: Just so I don't forget, how much does your product cost?

JA: Vibe DE^TM 1.0 is $49.95.

MB: That's $50??

JA: Yes, $50. It's targeted at the high-end business development programmer who needs to build Java applications. The reason why I'd buy it is for the development platforms and the application you create is deployable across all those platforms for a native look-and-feel.

MB: And that's something we've been discussing here at JavaOne. There is one group who wants to have the "one look" for their application across all platforms. The other group want to have the native look-and-feel, like SGI's look on SGI, Mac's look on Mac, and they want Windows look on Windows. So there's the two groups of people. Are you able to do both of those or do you just target the look of the local platforms?

JA: There's a switch at runtime you can choose to run Motif on Macintosh, if you wanted to. You could do that. That's built in.

MB: Interesting.

JA: The strength of Vibe is its class libraries which have been developed over the past 8 years. Visix also has a product called Galaxy which is a C and C++ development environment.

MB: I've heard of that.

JA: It's very high end. Vibe is essentially the Java implementation of those class libraries. It's priced very differently because the market is very different. We're looking at $200 IDEs. People ask that question, "where's the difference?" It's the market that's driving us differently. Also, Vibe is basically a subset of the Galaxy class libraries.

A little history of how we started with Vibe: back in '95 when JavaOne wasn't even thought of, when Java was just a language spec by Sun, Visix was planning to develop a new cross-platform development environment. Visix considered Python, Syntactically Sugared C, and Java. Java was our choice. We didn't know all this was going to happen around us. We chose Java for it's cross-platform nature, compile to bytecode, ease of use, etc.

MB: Ok, I was going to ask you why did you choose Java over all the rest.

JA: I wasn't here at the time. Visix did a study and Java was the one that made sense. Good choice, huh?

MB: It probably came out with the best score on the trade study that they did.

JA: Yes. One of Visix's strength is the cross-platform portability in the Galaxy product so we were looking to leverage that. That was key and Java obviously fits that bill very well. It fit in well with our strategy. So we proceeded down that path and the result is Vibe. It was released March 3rd for both Windows and Solaris. Versions for Linux, AIX and IRIX will be available soon and we have a MacOS beta version on our web site right now.

MB: What is your web site?

JA: http://www.visix.com. Vibe DE is basically designed for a single-user license for $49.95 [USD] so you can build a Java application and deploy it freely. There's no charge for run-times.

MB: Oh good. No run-time royalties. We like that!

JA: Right. The next version of Vibe will be called GT +^TM. That will be available in the summer timeframe. Vibe will support JDK 1.1, JavaBeans, JDBC, and we'll leverage the JNI layer so Vibe built apps can run in any JVM. Right now, Vibe requires its own VM.

MB: So you have your own VM inside of Vibe?

JA: That's correct. It is required because of our native libraries. JNI will allow us to get out of the VM wars.

MB: Good! Sounds like I should have a look at it.

JA: There will also be available soon on our web site a beta of Vibe Enterprise^TM which is our database connectivity development environment. It provides native Oracle and Sybase connectivity as well as ODBC. It will provide the database drivers and data aware widgets that a database person is going to require to build an application: fields, forms, ... that kind of thing.

MB: How much will that cost?

JA: We're probably looking at $2000 [USD].

MB: Ok, just the general ballpark. It's not going to be $50 [USD].

JA: No.

(group chuckle)

JA: There's also another product that's going to come out in the next 2 to 3 months called VibeNet^TM which is a distributed computing product. We're basically building an ORB, a CORBA based ORB into our VM.

MB: Really? And how are you doing that? Did you write your own IDL?

JA: No, what's going to happen is there will be an ORB built into our VM so when someone builds a Vibe app and they want to access a remote object, they will program as if the object is local. So you don't need to go through all the IDL rigamarole, stubs, and skeletons, and so forth. You just program your Vibe app as if it's a local object. With all the GC [garbage collection] VM/ORB.

MB: According to access permissions and security and all?

JA: Yes. We've taken a different approach. Other companies who have gone down this path have ackowledged our implementation and say "you guys have come up with a pretty interesting solution."

MB: Ok. Great. Christine, do you have anything you'd like to add?

Christine Chartier: No, at this point just some questions for you more than anything. How do you think your readers would respond to Vibe?

MB: Ok, I'll ask them. Thank-you very much.

So, Mokabyte readers, go have a look at the Vibe development environment found at the Visix web site along with related articles. One of the articles you will want to read there is entitled Visix Software Unveils Suite of Java Development Products. Then, tell us what you think. Send your comments about Vibe to MokaByte (attention: Marie Alm) or to Visix.

Visix Software, headquartered in Reston, VA, offers the industry's most powerful development environments to enable rapid delivery of business-critical application performance in C, C++ and Java. Visix development technology includes not only the Vibe suite of products but also the Galaxy Application Environment®, an award-wining client/server application development and distribution environment. Visix's customers include Fortune 1000 corporations, independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators, government agencies, universities and research facilities.

For more information on Visix and its products, visit Visix's web page at:
http://www.visix.com

For more information about the Vibe suite of products, see the "Visix Software Unveils Suite of Java Development Products" press release issued on April 2.

---

Galaxy Application Environment is a registered trademark of Visix Software, Inc.
Vibe is a trademark of Visix Software, Inc.
All other company and product names mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.