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Getting the Java Developer's Kit
Getting the Java Developer's Kit
(JDK)
- Okay, OOP is quite
abstract and if you're like me, your brain is probably
swimming by now.
- So let's step back and do some
really concrete stuff. let's get ourselves a copy of the
Java Developer's Kit so that we can actually try out some
actual examples of all of this stuff.
- The JDK is a development environment
which allows you to create Java Programs.
- It includes such essential things as
the java class libraries, the javac bytecode compiler and
the java virtual machine which you can use to execute your
applications.
- There are plenty of other
development environments such as Symantec Cafe,
Microsoft's SDK, J++. However, I recommend that you go through the
process of developing with the JDK in order to really get a
good feel for the processs of creating and compiling Java by
hand. Visual developmnt tools are very nice, but they do
not help you understand the inner workings of the language.
- The most recent version as of this
writing is
JDK
1.1.5 and will come as a self extracting archive. Here
is a screen shot of what the
Javasoft site should look like. And here is an example of a
Save Dialog generated by my
web browser when I began to download the JDK. Give yourself
plenty of time because the JDK takes a good ten minutes to
download, especially over a modem. Go ahead and download
the documentation as well.
- Once you have downloaded the
self-extracting archive, you should execute it (typically by
double clicking on it). When you do so, the install program
will walk you through an installation of the JDK on your
local machine. Here is what
it looked like when I started Install Shield.
- In order to keep your hard disk
organized, I recomend installing the JDK in a top level
folder like "C:\Java\Sun" because it is likely that you will
get other "Java-centric" libraries and development kits in
the future.
- When the installation program is
done working, you should have the JDK installed on your
machine. Here is what
my directory structure looked like after I installed it:
Additional Resources:
Exercise Five
Table of Contents
Setting Your Development Environment
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