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Setting Your Development Environment
- In order to use your Java Development
Kit, you will need to let your computer know where it is
located. Typically this involves setting two environment
variables, the CLASSPATH and the PATH variables.
- Since I use a PC running Windows, I
am going to walk you through a Windows setup. However, the
PATH and CLASSPATH variables should be accessible in a similar
way on whatever platform you are using.
- On windows, your environment
information is defined in your autoexec.bat file which should
be located in your root directory such as C:\autoexec.bat. On
UNIX it will be in your .rc file such as tcsh.rc.
- Before anything else, save this file as
autoexec.prejava. This way, if you screw anything up, you can return
to how things were before you started mucking.
- Now use your favorite ASCII text editor
to open the file and prepare to modify it.
- In particular, you will need to
modify/create two lines.
- The first line is the line which
defines your PATH. The PATH definition is typically a set
of absolute paths separated by semicolons such as in the
following:
PATH = location of your java bin directory;other path info
For example, mine looks like this:
PATH=c:\Java\Microsoft\SDK-Java\Bin;c:\Java\Sun\jdk1.1.4\bin
- Next, you will need to tell your
computer where it can find all of the class files needed by
the JDK. To do this you define the CLASSPATH variable using
the following syntax:
set CLASSPATH=.;location of java classes;
For example, mine looks like this
set CLASSPATH=.;c:\Java\Sun\jdk1.1.4\lib\classes.zip;
- Now all you need to do is restart
your computer so that these new variables will be read into
the system.
| On UNIX, the
elements in the PATH and CLASSPATH are separated by colons
instead of semi-colons, so the PATH shown above would look
like the following in a UNIX configuration file...
PATH=/Java/Microsoft/SDK-Java/Bin:/Java/Sun/jdk1.1.4/bin
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- Okay, once we have setup our
environment, we are almost ready to try out our first Java
program. However, before we do that, let's take a quick
detour into the language itself so that we are prepared for
the Java-specific syntax necessary to write a Java
program.
Getting the Java Developer's Kit
Table of Contents
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