On July 23, 1996, JDJ interviewed Mansour Safai, General Manager, Internet Tools Division, Symantec Corp.

JDJ: Could you please introduce yourself and your organization to our readers?
MS: I am the General Manager of the Internet Tools Division at Symantec Corporation. Symantec has a number of business units. Probably the most well known ones are Norton Utilities, Norton Antivirus, Delrina, and Symantec Contact Management - ACT! software. We are in the same company as the others and we receive the same services, but we are a separate business unit called the Internet Tools Business unit. We are basically a small entrepreneurial group that is dedicated to and focused on developing tools for the Internet platforms. Right now we have a very large focus on Java and this means everything from developing tool sets for Java as well as developing visual and database solutions.

JDJ: How and when did Symantec first get interested in Java and the Internet?
MS:Four years ago Symantec acquired four or five small companies that were in the development tools market for the C++ business. Years were spent on developing state of the art development tools for C++, but the C++ market has been declining since mid-1994. Most of the new development is being done using more visual environments such as Visual Basic, Delphi or PowerBuilder, but we are still moving forward on our C++ technologies.

So we found ourselves in the first half of last year with a great technology, great tools, a great team, and a shrinking market. We started looking around for the best growth segment for our expertise and the thing we came up with was Internet development. At the time it looked like Java was closest to our expertise. I have to admit that current events are making us look more intelligent then we deserve, because when we chose to go ahead with Java, Java had not taken off yet. Now, the degree of success is so high that it's obviously benefiting us in a big way, but we didn't expect it. We just wanted to take a technology that applied well to our expertise and leverage on our capabilities to provide good solutions for Internet development. We got involved with Java and we wanted to be the number one provider. We wanted to be the first one to market a complete tool set and get to where we owned most of the market. We didn't want to come in as an underdog and try to get back a percentage of the market from somebody else.

JDJ: In a recent press release, you said that Café was the most popular Internet development tool set. How well has Café penetrated the Java developers market?
MS: It's hard for us to estimate where we are in relation to everybody else. What I meant in that release is that in the Java news group on the Internet called comp.lang.java, you can see how popular we are just by looking at the messages. There are dozens and dozens of threads talking about Café and the Symantec products, so what we did at the time was run a survey involving some of the folks on comp.lang.java to try and see what percentage of people were using our product vs. other products. People were overwhelmingly using Café. There were a large number of people using the free Java Development Kit that Sun posts on their Web site, but the Java Development Kit is not really a development environment, so we didn't really see ourselves competing with the JDK. The JDK is great for getting people started on Java and then, if they are really serious, they get into a development environment . That's where we come into play, and we are pretty much the only game in town. The other vendors either don't have anything available or what they provide is limited or too unstable. One of the reasons that we are more stable than the other vendors is that we have had more time. We had to fix a lot of problems in Java so that if you are developing with Café, you are going to be a lot more productive.

JDJ: What is your marketing philosophy? Are you trying to market to everyone who wants to create a Java application or just to the developer who wants to create a full commercial quality Inter or Intranet environment?
MS: Café is a product that is targeted mainly for people who understand how to use a development environment. If you just want to drag and drop some components inside a Web page to get some animation or a quick application, Café is not really going to help you. Our strategy was first to address those technical people, as they were the first ones to be interested in Java. But, the market is really made out of very different types of people. You have people who are graphic designers and who need to be able to quickly put together a piece of Java without actually having to program it. They might want to do it for animation or something that will set their Web page apart. There are people in client/server development who want to get database connectivity and they need to get that kind of support. There are Web site administrators who have to provide some kind of common service on a Web server to everybody who is developing pages for that server. There is also a pretty large segment of hobbyists, people who are just playing around with Java and the Internet.

JDJ: What are the new tools in the upcoming new release of Café and how do you think they will effect the development life cycle?
MS: First, we are releasing a new version of Café, version 1.5 for Windows and the final version for Macintosh. The new features include a much faster compiler thats now up to fifty times faster than the Sun compiler, and a slew of new debugger features for watching expressions, data tips, etc. In addition, we are rolling out at the end of this quarter our new product line, Visual Café. This will let you do more RAD (Rapid Application Development), and let you make a quick application by visually dragging and dropping a component within a form. If a person is a professional programmer, he will be able to dig deeper and do sophisticated Java programming. It will be like a Delphi for Java and provide the ease of use of Visual Basic for Java development, but also have the power of C++. One of the main things is that people are going to want is a lot of prebuilt components to come with the environment. We will ship dozens of prebuilt components and widgets so people are going to be able to drag and drop to create an applet. The environment is really component oriented as opposed to file based. People are going to be able to write their own components and then wire them together visually. The problem is that we have not really announced the details of Visual Café yet. One thing that I can tell you is that today, to connect a Web page to a database is a pretty complicated process, so one of the things that Visual Café will allow you to do is to very quickly is to create general Web pages that have database connectivity. There will be a lot of support to make that easy. This will include complete support for JDBC, and whole slew of native SQL for the main database back-ends such as Oracle, Informix, and Sybase. We haven't released the full details of Visual Café, but it will have a full range of development tools including version control and team project management. So it will provide support to anyone: from people who need easy to use development tools for visual programming all the way to advanced programmers. It's a feature full environment.

JDJ: What do you see as some of the trends that may affect your Java development tools.
MS: I think the most important trend right now is that people are realizing that Intranet applications are becoming as or more important then the Internet itself. That has a tremendous impact on the way you do development. Java is going to have to find its space on the Intranet and I think that there will have to be a kind of coexistence with native code. We are not going to want to sacrifice speed or features. This is going to impact Java and people who do Java development.

JDJ: Could you describe how your latest beta cycle has been going? If a developer wants to participate in the cycle, how would he go about doing it?
MS:Café users can download the beta for free. When you buy Café, you get a user name and password in the box. That will give you access to a secure Web server on the Café Web site. That is where the preview of Visual Café is going to be. We are now in limited beta. People are very enthusiastic about Café and very surprised that we are coming out with Visual Café because Café is so popular. We could come out with this new environment because we had several parallel development teams working side by side. There were a couple of teams doing the Café product for Windows and Café for the Macintosh. However, we also had a team doing Visual Café for Windows and another team doing Visual Café for the Macintosh, in addition to the database team. These developments were happening in parallel and that's why we can roll them out so quickly, one after another. People really like the idea of our dramatically enhancing the capabilities of Café in such a short period of time. We have not posted the database support yet, but that will be posted within the next few weeks. In addition, our Café users will be able to upgrade to Visual Café for only the price difference. Hence they can own both products for the price of only one.

JDJ: What has been the most difficult aspect of producing Café?
MS: The most difficult aspect is the fact that Java itself had a lot of problems with it. When we started Java, it was in beta one and then it went to beta two and 1.0. Throughout that time the tool support for Java and the debugger support inside the Java kernel was minimal. This has always been a problem. Because of market pressure, we couldn't wait for Sun to take the time to fix it. We had to fix a lot of the problems with Java ourselves and make sure that the libraries and the interpreter were in decent shape. It reminds me of the old Windows 3.0 days when Windows 3.0 was more unstable than most of the application that you could write for it. A lot of people wrote very good software and the way they did it was to work around a lot of the bugs. I remember that it was a nightmare for the tool vendors as well because you could not write a debugger that worked well in a stable manner on Windows 3.0.

JDJ: How do you and Sun get along? Are you able to do codevelopment together?
MS: Absolutely. I have a lot of respect for Sun. While there were a lot of things in Java that weren't ready or finished from a tool point of view, they built a really solid base. We have a very tight relationship with them. We are very lucky because the JavaSoft building is about 100 meters away from the Symantec building where we are! For example, when they started working on the JavaBeans spec, they just gave us a call and five minutes later we were in their meeting room. It's just great. They are very aware of the changes that we have made to Java, As soon as we find bugs or fixes, or need anything from them, we let them know right away. I think that Sun and specifically JavaSoft have done a tremendous job. They have been a very good and neutral player with all the ISV's.

JDJ: Is there anything that you would like to add?
MS: The first thing that I would say it that we have been very lucky because in the last few months we have had a large number of customers who have provided a tremendous help for shaping our future versions. They have been key to our success by telling us what we need to do, the areas that are unstable, and what enhancements they'd like to see. In general, this has been a bigger asset than anything else we could have dreamt of. We have a direct connection with a Java developer community and they have told us what they want to have in the next version. I hope that the Visual Café product line is what they want, because that is where it came from!

JDJ: Do you come into contact with your clients much yourself?
MS: Yes, I participate in the comp.lang.java news group. At least once a week, I log in and look at a lot of the threads and end up talking to people on-line. What will often happen after that is that people will send me a private message and we will have a private conversation. They will tell me, "Hey, here is what we are doing and this is what we would really like to see." It's really great because it gives you the capability of finding out what is important to people and what is happening outside. Customers can be very helpful and shed light in an area that may not be clear to you. It is really a two-way street. We have benefited and we try to give something back to the customer base. We have put out new versions of Café, new features and bug fixes at regular intervals. It's really one of the greatest things about the Web. It allows you to just plug yourself in and everybody is out there.

JDJ: What's the strangest communication you've had in the Java news group?
MS: The most unusual guy we found on the net, we hired. We found this person who was amazing from the standpoint that he was helping everyone with their Java problems, knew Café and could answer questions on C++. He was all over the place. You would send a message to him at midnight and five minutes later he would reply to you. So we hired him. He is now in charge of Web relations here.

JDJ: Is there anything you can tell us about yourself or the people you work with.
MS: I'd like to say that we do have a good team here, but with the success of Café, we're going to need a lot of help, so we have a lot of open positions. If any developers out there are interested in joining the Café team, they should give us a call.