Do It Yourself (Stone-age technique)

The following are the steps to set up a JAVA development environment on your PC. The development environment is for J2SE.

1. Download J2SE installation program;
2. Execute J2SE installation program to install J2SE;
3. Set up environment variables Path and classpath;
4. Download J2SE online HELP documentation.

J2SE installation program can be downloaded from the website of Sun Microsystem's child company Javasoft:

http://java.sun.com/

When downloading the installation program, make sure you choose the version that matches the operating system of your machine, and also make sure you choose the most recent version.

To install the JAVA development environment, simply execute the downloaded installation program, and follow the instructions of the installation program.

The next step, Step 3, is to set the environment variables of the computer for execution of the JAVA toolkit: the execution path Path and the library path classpath. The execution path variable records the paths of various executables. The system uses the values of this variable to find the location of an executable. Therefore, by including the execution path of J2SE in the execution path list, one avoids the need to input the entire path when executing a J2SE program. The classpath environment variable is used to record the path of J2SE class library. This is a environment variable needed by J2SE. Usually the value of classpath is set to the current path (represented as ".") and the path of J2SE class library (these two paths are separated by a ";"). If the installation path of J2SE is C:\j2sdk (if the actuall installation path is not C:\j2sdk, use the actual installation path to replace C:\j2sdk), then the environment variables should be set as follows:

Path = %path%;C:\j2sdk\bin
classpath = .;C:\j2sdk\lib

(1) Use the left button of your mouse to sequentially click the desktop menu items "Start", "Setting", and "Control Panel".

(2) Use the left button of your mouse to double click the "System" logo of the Control Panel to get the dialog window for "System Properties".

(3) In the "System Properties" dialog window, select "Environment" if the operating system is Windows NT. If the operating system is Windows 2000 or XP, select "Advanced". (In the following, we show how to set the environment variables for Windows 2000 only. The steps for Windows NT or XP are similar.)

(4) In the new "System Properties" dialog window, use the left button of your mouse to click the "Environment Variables" button to get the dialog box for this button.

(5) In the "User variables" list and "System variables" list of the "Environment Variables" dialog window, update the values of Path and classpath, respectively. If the variables lists do not contain these variables, add these variables into these lists.

Usually, both variable lists would contain the execution path Path. Select this variable in the variable lists and click the "Exit..." button (if the variable list does not contain that variable, click the "New..." button then). In the editing box of "Variable Value", append ";C:\j2sdk\bin" to the end of the current values. Here, ";" is used to separate the current execution paths from the execution path of J2SE. Once the updating step is done, click the "OK" button to return to the dialog box of "Environment Variables".

Usually, none of the User Variables list and the System Variables list would contain the variable classpath. One needs to create this variable for both lists. This is done by clicking the "New..." button underneath the lists to get a dialog window and inputting the variable name "classpath" and its value ".;C:\j2sdk\lib". Once the creation of this variable is done for both lists, close the dialog windows for both "Environment Variables" and "System Properties" to finish the setting of environment variables for J2SE.

The last step, Step 4, is to download the online J2SE HELP documentation from the website of Javasoft (http://java.sun.com). This online J2SE HELP documentation contains detailed description of JAVA's class library. One needs to reference it frequently when learning the JAVA language and developing JAVA programs. The downloaded online HELP documentation usually is a compressed document. One needs to use an uncompressing software (e.g., WinZip) to open this document and use IE or Netscape browser to browse it.