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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

JAVelin: World’s first graphical development environment for JAVA.

Sydney, Australia: Step Ahead Software, developers of the 
internationally successful Visual Classworks graphical object oriented 
development tool for C++ developers released their JAVA development 
environment, JAVelin on Wednesday 6 March. A time limited evaluation 
version is available from http://www.ozemail.com.au/~stepsoft.

JAVelin is the world’s first graphical object oriented development tool 
for JAVA. Creating new classes is as simple as a right click on the 
mouse and entering the name of the class. Classes are represented in a 
slick, graphical design window as icons. Class fields (or data) and 
methods can be easily created and modified all from within the design 
window. Drag and drop inheritence makes extending the features of one 
class in another very straightforward. Step Ahead Software’s legendary 
“InSync” code generation works in the background, automatically 
manipulating the underlying class source files to reflect the changes 
made by the user as they drive the graphical user interface. With 
JAVelin, users never have to worry about dealing directly with the 
underlying text files. Their focus can remain on the essence of object 
oriented programming - designing, implementing and refining classes, 
fields and their methods.

Chris Colman, the technical director of Step Ahead Software says, “The 
JAVelin tool basically says to developers, “This is the nineties, JAVA 
is a 90’s language, why should you be focussed on opening, editing and 
closing an unruly bunch of text files when the 90’s focus is on 
classes.” With JAVelin the focus is unashamedly on classes, their data 
and methods and the relationships between classes. All of these are 
shown graphically in front of the programmer and access to details such 
as field types, method code etc., is never more than a few clicks away”.

An “in built”, intelligent editor provides editing facilities to modify 
source code for individual methods. A right click menu in the editor 
gives quick access to other components of the design which can then be 
pasted directly into the editor to save typing and remembering the names 
of classes, fields or methods.
At the user’s request JAVelin will automatically invoke the JAVA 
compiler (available free from Sun’s web site) to compile the underlying 
JAVA code.

JAVelin is itself a truly object oriented package. The core “class 
modelling” capabilities of Visual Classworks/C++ and used in JAVelin 
have been in commercial use and refinement for over three years. This 
core functionality has been designed in a language independent way so 
that it can be easily extended and reused in true object oriented style, 
making it easy for us to create new products to support languages such 
as JAVA.

Chris says,  “I was a believer in the object oriented way of programming 
from my first exposure to it in the late eighties. I could see its 
benefits in terms of reduced development time and increased quality and 
robustness and knew that it was not just another fad. Not long after I 
had a vision to make these benefits more easily obtainable for 
mainstream programmers by developing a graphical approach to object 
oriented programming and so formed Step Ahead Software. We see the 
results of our vision in Visual Classworks/C++ and now JAVelin.”

Chris adds: “Practising what we preach meant applying object oriented 
methods to the development of our tool and using the tool to develop 
itself! The upshot of this is that incorporating support for the JAVA 
language took only about two weeks. As a bonus we now have a set of 
robust code to implement our graphical class modelling that is common to 
both the JAVA and C++ products. This means that we have less code to 
maintain and that class modelling features get added to both products at 
the same time. Equally important is the fact that our users can take OO 
designs developed for the C++ tool and move them accross to the JAVA 
tool, and visa versa, and automatically generate a very significant 
amount of the code in the other language.”

JAVelin runs on Win3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT (long file names and 
certai n other features are not supported when running on Win31). To 
compile and test code users will also require the JAVA JDK (available 
free from Sun’s web site) which contains the JAVA compiler and library 
classes.

JAVelin was released on this Wednesday 6 March 1996. It’s E.R.P. is $599 
but, as an introductory offer for a short time only, the price will be 
held at $249 including shipping to anywhere in the world. A time limited 
version is available on our web site 
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~stepsoft. Purchasing information can also be 
obtained from here or by ringing 02 477 3398

-- 
Chris Colman         
Step Ahead Software, Makers of Visual Classworks and JAVelin
email:	stepsoft@ozemail.com.au
web:	http://www.ozemail.com.au/~stepsoft