Power tools for the Web

Microsoft's Visual InterDev tops this roster of high-end Web development tools.

By Steven M. Cohn
Network World, 12/8/97

Want a Web site that will survive the onslaught of hits you hope to generate? Then make sure your site-construction tools are professional-strength. Your checklist should include full buzzword compliance, a treasure chest of wizards and prebuilt components, and the ability to get your hands on real code.

We looked at four such tools for creating industrial-strength Web sites. Each has a server-side engine and a fancy integrated development environment (IDE), which allows you to write both browser-based scripts and server-side code.

Our evaluation revealed one clear winner for companies whose standard Web server platform is Windows NT Server running Internet Information Server (IIS). Visual InterDev 1.0 from Micro-soft Corp. is a powerful and familiar tool for team development, offering rich features and seamless integration with Visual Studio 97. However, since Visual InterDev's technologies are just starting to migrate to Unix, those of you in a Unix shop will want to take a look at HAHTsite 3.0 from HAHT Software, Inc. Its maturity, scalability and breadth of tools offset its high price tag.

Of the other two products we looked at, Sapphire/Web 4.0 from Bluestone Software, Inc. was in close contention with HAHTsite, while Cold Fusion 3.0 from Allaire Corp. was more of an InterDev look-alike that still has a little growing up to do.

Snapping together applications

Visual InterDev includes plenty of wizards for starting different types of projects, themes for designing Web sites and short templates for starting common files. These shortcuts help you build most of an application with little or no coding. Once you begin implementing custom business logic, you can generate HTML code and server-side scripts using design-time controls. The controls create snippets of server-side script that make it easy to produce interactive and fully functional Web pages.

Visual InterDev's Query Designer is one of the most powerful graphical user interface database query builders we've seen (see Figure 1). You may, in fact, want to purchase Visual InterDev for the database tools alone. With native connections to Microsoft SQL Server, Visual InterDev can create, delete or modify tables, fields, triggers and stored procedures.

Allaire's Cold Fusion uses a similar model. The Cold Fusion Application Server is built to recognize extensions to HTML called Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML). CFML files look like normal HTML files but contain extra tags and embedded functions recognized by the Application Server. If you're adventurous, you can use an included C++ API library to create your own custom CFML tags. Cold Fusion also ships with a small, but powerful, set of Java applets that can be accessed through CFML tags.

Last month, Allaire released Cold Fusion Studio, a visual development environment with a high-powered version of Allaire's Homesite HTML editor that supports syntax coloring, integrated preview mode and JavaScript wizards. Its text editor displays context-sensitive tool tips to assist in editing HTML and CFML tags. While you're typing in tags, drop-down lists appear, providing known tag parameters. Cold Fusion Studio has a built-in Query Builder and Database Browser that looks and acts much like those found in Visual InterDev. However, Cold Fusion Studio doesn't have the native database management capabilities available in Visual InterDev.

Other nice features of Cold Fusion Studio include powerful table and frame wizards, which allow you to build complex structures without knowing many HTML tags, as well as a Document Weight window, which analyzes the size and estimated download time of a document.

Programming in HAHT's HAHTsite involves using a Visual Basic syntax-compatible language called HAHTtalk Basic. When you first create a new project, HAHTsite generates a substantial amount of HAHTtalk code that handles events and database requests from the client. A unique feature of HAHTsite is its integrated server-side debugging capability. You can interactively debug server-side HAHTtalk code in the IDE as an application runs (see Figure 2).

For the client side, HAHTsite has a good built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor that lets you switch between a graphical view and an HTML source view. It also comes with a well-designed image map editor. For HTML pages with frame sets, HAHTsite has a Frames Wizard that can be used to design framed pages at any level of complexity. HAHTsite also has a scripting wizard to assist you with client-side JavaScript or VBScript, but it's not as robust as Visual InterDev's Script Wizard.

Bluestone's Sapphire/Web began its life as a Web development tool based on C and Common Gateway Interface. While maintaining backwards-compatibility, Release 4.0 integrates more current technologies. Rather than trying to compete with the many Java development products on the market, Bluestone wisely decided to focus on gluing the pieces together. It integrates with any available Java compiler and can handle C++ and Java on the server side.

Developing a Sapphire/Web application involves three basic steps. First, you create the HTML pages that make up the project and decide which objects will become activators. An activator is a hyperlink or a form field that activates code on the server. Second, you design the data objects (SQL statements or stored procedures) associated with each activator. Finally, you bind the activators with their respective data objects using the Bind Editor. At times we found Sapphire/Web's IDE to be a little cumbersome, requiring a fair amount of fine mouse control and lots of clicking. But the whole process is an effective way of programming simple tasks on the server. More detailed code may need to be added depending upon the complexity of your project.

Project management

Visual InterDev has an intuitive and flexible project management facility. Its project window resembles the Windows Explorer tree pane. At the root level of this tree resides the user's workspace - a container for projects. You can add multiple projects to a single workspace. Each project represents a single Web application, and each Web application is associated with a directory on a Web site. Although you can have only one workspace open at a time, you can share and move projects among workspaces.

Cold Fusion maintains a simplistic view of all known projects in its project window. This window is divided into three panes: a project list, a folder list for the current project, and a file list for the current folder. However, this universal view of all projects is the only view allowed. You cannot create a new view and you cannot move projects into or out of this view. This can quickly become cumbersome when dealing with large Web sites. Also, we wished Cold Fusion Studio provided a drag-and-drop feature to allow us to move files between folders and projects.

HAHTsite project management facilities are a hybrid of those found in Visual InterDev and Sapphire/Web. This product allows you to open only one project at a time. The project window contains a tree view that is divided into six general folders, including your application files, URL aliases, reusable page objects and data sources. There also is a Widgets

folder that comes prepopulated with components that can be shared by all projects. You can extend this library with your own custom widgets.

Sapphire/Web likewise allows you to open only one project at a time and doesn't allow you to create subfolders within a project. But it does give you a slightly deeper view of each project file, including embedded links and database bindings. Sapphire/Web also organizes global objects in a separate window, including database sources, functions and executables that can be shared among all projects.

Publishing

Visual InterDev can publish to the Web server via HTTP. You can choose to copy all files in the project or just those that have changed since the last update. We wish there also was an option to publish only selected files, especially if your test server uses different Open Database Connectivity connections from your production server. You can copy the application to any Web server reachable via HTTP, even through a firewall. You also have the option of using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt files if you want to transmit them across an unsecured network.

Cold Fusion Studio has two methods of interacting with remote information: HTTP or File Transfer Protocol. You can connect directly to a remote Cold Fusion Application Server via HTTP, optionally with SSL, and manage a remote directory as if it were local to the IDE. For projects created locally and managed by the Studio Project window, you can publish to a remote FTP server. This method gives you the option of copying all files or just those that have changed since the last publication. Since you can't publish a project via HTTP, the remote FTP server must be configured to overlap the directory structure on the Web server.

HAHTsite's publishing capabilities are similar to those of Visual InterDev. HAHTsite rebuilds out-of-date pieces of your project using an internal procedure similar to the Unix make command. It then interrogates every part of your project, reporting on missing links and invalid bindings. Finally, it publishes your project to the selected server by either direct file copy or FTP. You can choose to publish your entire project, only the files that have changed or only selected files. Unfortunately, HAHTsite doesn't have the option to publish with HTTP, making it impossible to publish through a firewall unless that firewall allows FTP to the server.

Sapphire/Web allows you to configure each project with a test directory and a release directory. While developing your project, files are saved in the test directory. You then use a one-button publishing function to deploy files to the release directory. Unfortunately, directories are limited to those locally accessible on the development machine. You need to manually transfer files via FTP or develop scripts to automate copying your project files to remote production Web servers.

Link verification

Cold Fusion Studio can verify the links on a single page or all links in a project. Its Link Checker tool lists the links on each page and marks each as either good or bad using appropriate icons. The Link Checker does not show a graphical map of the Web project, but it is an easy way of validating the connections between pages.

HAHTsite allows you to right-click on any document in the project window and open a window showing all references to and from the document. You also can show a global view of the entire project.

However, this link view does not show invalid or unresolved links. We assume the reason for this is that all links are checked during publishing, but it would be nice to be able to view broken links during design time as well.

Sapphire/Web expands upon its project viewer with a Project Mapper window, a graphical utility similar to Visual InterDev's Link View. It shows valid and invalid links and renders detailed views of bindings between activators and data sources.

This turned out to be a useful means of understanding the structure of unfamiliar projects. By right-clicking on an object in the Project Mapper, you have immediate access to related object editors, such as the Object Bind Editor.

Summary