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[click for larger image] U.C. Berkeley's DENIM and a Tablet PC are perfect companions for initial website design.

DENIM is a tool from the academic world-from the Group for User Interface Research at U.C. Berkeley, to be precise-to facilitate initial website design. In the early stages of design, you don't want to get bogged down closing </TABLE> tags and the like. Instead, you want to toss a bunch of pages onto a whiteboard or napkin, sketch in some labels and placeholders for text and pictures, and start dragging things around. Pretty soon, you and your design partners can spiral in on a workable design. Only then do you fire up more traditional authoring tools and generate the content.

What I found most appealing is the informal nature of DENIM's interface, which invites experimentation. Want to sketch in some text? Go ahead. Want to just represent a paragraph with squiggles? That works, too. The program animates smoothly among almost a dozen levels of detail, from "Detail" (only part of one page visible) up to "Overview" (the entire site is shown, with pages represented by icons). Hyperlinks are constructed by simply drawing a line from a chunk of text to another page; there's a "Run" command that lets you browse your pages and links.

Where does that tablet come in? The user interface cries out for direct manipulation via pen or stylus. Try this experiment: Download and view the demo movie. Impressive, eh? They grab and drag and sketch with merry abandon, and content appears to just flow from the pen. Now, download DENIM and try the same thing with a mouse. Aaaargh! NEED ... TABLET! (In my case, it was a trackball, which explains the screen shot's "informal" nature.)

I don't know if I'd call DENIM a "product" quite yet-although it's at version 1.1-I'd still say that it's more of a "project." Nevertheless, it's worth looking at, especially the demo video on the site. Even if you don't wind up using it, it'll get you thinking. DENIM is a free download, and runs on most flavors of Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and other Unix-ish operating systems; the Java 2 SDK 1.4 is required (and can be downloaded with DENIM).

Check it out at guir.berkeley.edu/projects/denim/.

—Rick Wayne

You Can Be Too Rich or Too Thin

Think not? OK-supermodels. Q.E.D. Too fast, though-that's clearly impossible, at least in our field. And if you're dealing with heavy SQL transaction loads, the notion of "too fast" might be as fanciful as me grumbling "too thin" when I look in the mirror. IronGrid Software, however, aims to help you set a land-speed software record. Their new product, IronEye Cache, monitors what's going on between your JDBC application and its database. Each statement is shown in a tabular GUI, which lists how many times it has run, along with average and maximum execution times. Pick the laggards and click a button to cache 'em. After caching some of the statements, you can see the number of hits and the hit ratio on each one, so that you can monitor how well your set is making use of available resources.

IronGrid says that the cache is "write-through," which means that updates are written to the database immediately, and that the program's presence is completely transparent to the software using the database. IronEye Cache costs $695 per developer seat.

IronGrid Inc., 205 Brazos, Ste. A, Austin, TX 78701, Tel: (866) 314-4766, Fax: (512) 474-7409, www.irongrid.com.

—Rick Wayne

They're Doing It Again ...

[click for larger image] .TEST aims to automatically construct, perform and monitor tests of your .NET code.

Parasoft, not content with a closetful of awards (including a Jolt) for its Java-based testing products, is jumping into the .NET world. They've released .TEST, which promises to do for .NET classes what Jtest and C++Test do for those languages: automatically construct, perform and monitor a rack of torture tests that thoroughly wring out your code for you.

Like Jtest and C++Test, .TEST first performs a static analysis of your code-a neat trick, since they're working with the .NET assemblies from any .NET language. But the coding standards they rely on are cross-language, ranging from the informational "Always use 'camel case' for a parameter name," to the religiously controversial "Do not use Hungarian notation," to true bug-stoppers like "Avoid creating a property with the same name as an existing type" (in some languages, this results in ambiguity). The rules are thoughtfully referenced-the bit about Hungarian notation comes right out of Microsoft's .NET documentation, according to .TEST-and you can pick the ones you want to have turned on for your team.

Once the static analysis is out of the way, .TEST puts your code to work, dreaming up test cases and throwing them at your classes' methods to see how they behave. You can also construct your own test scenarios and add them to the list.

.TEST runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and starts at $3,495 for a single user.

Parasoft, 2031 S. Myrtle Ave., Monrovia, CA 91016, Tel: (888) 305-0041, Fax: (626) 305-3036, www.parasoft.com.

—Rick Wayne

The Meta-Wizard

Development environments are chockablock with wizards, which guide you through setting up complex bits of code. Trouble is, if you repeatedly face a particular idiosyncratic programming wrinkle, or have a home-grown coding standard you want to enforce, you're probably out of luck-after all, the IDE vendor can't think of everything in advance. While some IDEs let you construct wizards to include in your applications, I don't know of any that let you create wizards that run in the IDE itself.

Workstate's Codify tool is a Microsoft Visual Studio add-in that actually tops the wizard idea: It provides a toolbox for constructing your own C# or VB .NET code-generation templates. It's not simply a matter of saving code snippets for later insertion (I wouldn't waste your time with that!). Rather, Workstate has invented an XML dialect to specify templates that serve as input to a code generator, along with GUIs to create, edit and instantiate them. For example, you've probably lost count of the times you've trudged around this loop: "Create private field; type in getter method that returns its value; type in setter that sets its value." Codify ships with a template that lets you accomplish all that in point-and-shoot fashion; you can add properties to your class as fast as you can click and fill in the form. That's nice, but it shouldn't impress you terribly; how about a SQL Server access layer built into your class with a few clicks? What about strongly typed collections based on your classes, so that you don't have to downcast?

Of course, the included templates are just a starting place-your team can build what it needs. Workstate has thoughtfully included a GUI-based editor for the XML templates, so that you don't have to obsess over hand-inserting closing tags unless you really groove on that sort of thing.

Workstate has also thought about downstream editing changes, ever the bte noire of code-generation tools. It leaves itself enough bread crumbs in the code so that it can rerun the generation dialog, make changes there and regenerate-boom, you're done.

Codify 1.2 runs on Windows 2000, XP "or higher," according to the company's online help. (That help file also won my heart with "Hardware requirements: Uh ... hardware requirements just seem silly nowadays, don't they?") Codify costs $75 per user; a 14-day free trial is available.

Workstate, 760 South Third St., Columbus, OH 43206, Tel: (412) 436-0603, Fax: (412) 291-1499, www.workstate.com.

—Rick Wayne

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