1 Introduction

There are an enormous number of development environments for Java, some of which are freely available and some of which are commercial products. You may, in principal, use any development environment you want for CS139/CS149. However, we strongly recommend that you use the environment described below. This is not because it is necessarily the best environment but because it is fairly easy to install and use, and provides all of the capabilities you will need. The faculty and lab assistants will not provide any support/help on how to install or use any other environment.

2 Issues

You should be aware of the following issues:

1. Many applications (including many development tools) use the space character as a delimiter. This means that, in general, it is a bad idea to use spaces in file names and/or directory names.
2. See 1.

3 Downloading the Necessary Components

All of the components in the supported Java development environment are freely available. You should begin by downloading and saving all of the following:

Make sure you download the version for your operating system.

Note that if you have not written programs in Java before then you probably do not have the JDK installed. You might think you do because you have the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed, but the two are not the same. The JRE only allows you to run programs written in Java, it does not allow you to write them.

4 Installation

You should install the components in the following order:

1. Java Development Kit (JDK) ( Instructions)
2. jGRASP ( Instructions)

5 Testing the Installation Using jGRASP

To test your installation using jGRASP:

1. Run jGRASP.
2. Click on File, pull down to New, and pull down to Java.
3. Copy and paste the following fragment:

   public class InstallationTest
   {
   	public static void main(String[] args)
   	{
   		System.out.println("Java and jGRASP are working.");	
   	}
   }
   	  

   into the editing window.
4. Click on File and pull down to Save As, then click on the "Home" icon, name the file InstallationTest.java, and click on Save.
5. Click on Build and pull down to Compile.
6. After you see the text "----jGRASP: operation complete." in the Compile Messages window, click on Build and pull down to Run.
7. You should see the text "Java and jGRASP are working." in the Run I/O window.