I'm waiting to see what their follow-on product does. While I don't doubt the validity of this claim, I have found that doing anything except simple reconfiguration of the editor involves fairly complex steps that will take many hours to master. What is most disturbing here is the jump in complexity from a macro that inserts the comment characters for a documentation comment, to one that inserts such a comment with some fields filled in, such as author and version. Even with the extra cost documentation, it will be a while before I venture into those thorny regions of the system. The last required feature of any IDE is project management, which both the Borland and Symantec products offer.
Project management has both a source-code management flavor as well as a version control flavor.
Since the Symantec system has no version control at all, it is clearly at a disadvantage here. Both Borland 5.0 and Symantec Cafe do a good job of showing the applet and HTML pages of a project as well as building them. The difficulty comes when you are building a package of Java classes that is used by both an applet and an application, or by multiple applets and applications. When you develop Java classes that are used by several applets or applications, you need an IDE that understands this dependency, and rebuilds when necessary. Also, the notion of breaking interfaces is critical in Java as the language is late-bound, and a class change can cause a large number of applications to begin failing when you make an incompatible change.