Sun Microsystems' proprietary programming language has given vendors a tough job. This user wants to be productive on the Internet without having to write a lot of code. As Java comes to mean more things to more people, tool vendors struggle to target what's really important. Those programs were not publicly available during our testing, though we expect both to be at least in public beta by the time you read this. The tools we review vary in their support for event handling, which can be particularly tricky in the JDK 1.1 programming model.
Event handling is the way the program handles user or system events such as clicking a mouse.
Basically, programmers need to write inner classes in order to attach events to code. In most of the products reviewed here, tools automate that type of overhead. These Java tools vary as to how much Java a developer needs to know to do this component assembly. The next important area of functionality to consider is support for database connectivity. Ultimately, this is done through JDBC, but vendors vary in how close they require the developer to be to the nitty-gritty of database programming.