VisualAge was the name of a family of computer integrated development environments from IBM, which included support for a few popular (and not so popular) computer Programming_languages. An integrated development environment (IDE) (also known as an integrated design environment and integrated debugging environment) is computer software to help computer programmers develop software. ... International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) NYSE: IBM (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, NY, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services. ... Other listings of programming languages are: Categorical list of programming languages Generational list of programming languages Chronological list of programming languages Note: Esoteric programming languages have been moved to the separate List of esoteric programming languages. ...

Early History

VisualAge was born in the IBM development in Cary, North Carolina. The Cary lab was established in 1984 and staffed at the time primarily with IBM employees transferred from Poughkeepsie, New York. The Lab had responsibility for application development tools. The EZ View dialog manager product, a personal computer derivative of the user interface elements of the ISPF 327x product was one of the products. The lab also had a group which was one of the early adopters of Object Oriented Programming technologies within IBM using an internally developed language called ClassC to develop applications with more sophisticated graphical user interfaces which were just starting to be widely available. Cary is a town located in Wake County, North Carolina. ... 1984 is a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Poughkeepsie City of Poughkeepsie Town of Poughkeepsie Poughkeepsie, Arkansas This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a computer programming paradigm in which a software system is modeled as a set of objects that interact with each other. ... A graphical user interface (or GUI, sometimes pronounced gooey) is a method of interacting with a computer through a metaphor of direct manipulation of graphical images and widgets in addition to text. ...

Eventually, with the availability of usable implementations of Smalltalk in for IBM PC-AT class machines allowed IBM advanced technology projects experiment with Smalltalk. At about the same time, visual interface construction tools were coming up on the radar screens. Smalltalk research projects such as InterCons by David N. Smith of IBM, and Fabrik by a team at Apple led by Dan Ingalls were building interactive graphical applications built from composition of graphical primitives. Higher level construction of user interfaces was evidenced by other tools such as Jean Marie Hulot's interface builder first done in Lisp and then evolved to become the NeXT interface builder tool in NeXTStep which allowed for building user interfaces out by WYSIWYG composition of UI widgets which were could be "wired" to each other and to application logic written in Objective-C. The original prototype which led to VisualAge was the implementation of an interface builder like tool within the Smalltalk/V development environment. By the time VisualAge was released as a product, much more emphasis was placed on visual construction of application logic as well as of the user interface. This emphasis was in part due to the "positioning" for "strategic" reasons of Smalltalk as a generator rather than a language within IBM's System Application Architecture Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective, programming language designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others during the 1970s. ... IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151), running MS-DOS 5. ... International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) NYSE: IBM (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, NY, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services. ... Dan Ingalls is one of the creators of Smalltalk. ... The NeXT logo, designed by Paul Rand. ... Objective-C, often referred to as ObjC or more seldomly as Objective C or Obj-C, is an object oriented programming language implemented as an extension to C. It is used primarily on Mac OS X and GNUstep, two environments based on the OpenStep standard, and is the primary language... Systems Application Architecture (SAA) is a set of standards for computer software, developed by IBM in the 1980s and implemented in IBM operating systems including OS/2. ...

The VisualAge Name

The name VisualAge was the result of a contest between the members of the development team. After the initial release of VisualAge/Smalltalk the name VisualAge became a brand of its own and VisualAges were produced for several different combinations of languages and platforms.

Languages:

• C
• C++
• Fortran
• Java
• RPG
• TPF
• Smalltalk

Platforms: The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the... C++ (pronounced see plus plus) is a general-purpose computer programming language. ... Fortran (also FORTRAN) is a statically typed, compiled imperative computer programming language originally developed in the 1950s and still heavily used for scientific computing and numerical computation half a century later. ... Java is a reflective, object-oriented programming language developed initially by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems. ... RPG or RPG IV is a native programming language for IBMs iSeries (aka AS400) minicomputer system. ... TPF is an IBM real-time operating system for mainframes descended from the IBM System/360 family, including zSeries and System z9. ... Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective, programming language designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others during the 1970s. ...

• AIX operating system
• OS/2
• OS/400
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Microsoft Windows
• z/VM
• z/OS (Formerly known as OS/390, MVS)

Please note not every language is available on every platform listed. Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX) is the brand name of IBMs proprietary UNIX operating system. ... Version 2. ... OS/400 is an operating system used on IBMs line of AS/400 (now called iSeries) minicomputers. ... This article is about Linux-based operating systems, GNU/Linux, and related topics. ... Original 1984 Mac OS desktop Current 2005 Mac OS X desktop Mac OS, which stands for Macintosh Operating System, is Apple Computer’s name for the first operating systems for Macintosh computers. ... Microsoft Windows is a range of operating environments for personal computers and servers. ... z/OS is a 64-bit server operating system from IBM. It is the successor to the IBM mainframe operating system OS/390, combining MVS and UNIX System Services (a POSIX-compliant mainframe implementation of UNIX formerly known as MVS Open Edition). ... OS/390 is an IBM operating system for the System/370 and System/390 IBM mainframe computers. ... MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage) was the most commonly used operating system on the System/370 and System/390 IBM mainframe computers. ...

Evolution

Most of the members of the VisualAge family were written in Smalltalk no matter which language they supported for development. The IBM implementation of Smalltalk was produced by Object Technology International which was acquired by IBM and run as a wholly-owned subsidiary for several years before being absorbed into the overall IBM organization. VisualAge for Java was based on an extended Smalltalk virtual machine which executed both Smalltalk and Java byte codes. Java natives were actually implemented in Smalltalk. In general terms, a virtual machine in computer science is software that creates an environment between the computer platform and the end user in which the end user can operate software. ... Byte-code is a sort of intermediate code that is more abstract than machine code. ...

VisualAge Micro Edition, which supported development of embedded Java applications and cross system development, was a reimplementation of the IDE in Java. This version of VisualAge morphed into the Eclipse Framework. Eclipse is an open source platform-independent software framework for delivering what the project calls rich-client applications (as opposed to thin clients, this means the clients perform heavy-duty work on the host running the application). ...

VisualAge is no longer available. Various members of the family have been replaced by products in the WebSphere Studio family of products. WebSphere refers to a brand of IBM software products, although the term also popularly refers to one specific product: WebSphere Application Server (WAS). ...

External links

• Description from Portland Pattern Repository
• VisualAge Enterprise Suite
• VisualAge Smalltalk
• VisualAge for Java Tips and Tricks