Installing Java

As of this writing Java is not a fully developed commercial product. Versions of Java at varying stages of completion are available from Sun for Windows 95 and Windows NT for X86, Solaris 2.3 to 2.5, and MacOS 7.5. At the present time there are no versions of Java available for MIPS, Alpha or PowerPC based NT, Windows 3.1, or the Amiga.

Borland is also working a Java development environment to be released in the first half of 1996. Various third-party efforts are under way to port Java to other platforms including the Amiga, Windows 3.1, OS/2 and others.

The basic Java environment consists of a web browser that can play Java applets, a Java compiler to turn to Java source code into byte code, and a Java interpreter to run Java programs. These are the three key components of a Java environment. You’ll also need a text editor like Brief or BBEdit. Other tools like a debugger, a visual development environment, documentation and a class browser are also nice but aren’t absolutely necessary.

Note that it isn’t necessary to get all three of these from the same source. For instance Netscape is committed to providing a Java-enabled web browser. However it will only provide a Java compiler with the next version of its server products.

Sun has made the Java Developers Kit available for its supported platforms. It includes an applet viewer that will let you view and test your applets. The JDK also includes the javac compiler, the java interpreter, the javaprof profiler, the javah header file generator (for integrating C into your Java code), the Java debugger and limited documentation. However most of the documentation for the API and the class library is on Sun’s web site.

You can ftp the programs from the following sites:

* USA
o _ftp://ftp.javasoft.com/pub/
o _ftp://www.blackdown.org/pub/Java/pub/
o _ftp://ftp.science.wayne.edu/pub/java/
o _ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/languages/
o _ftp://java.dnx.com/pub/
* Germany: _ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/mirror/java.sun.com/JDK-beta-win32-x86.exe
* Korea: _ftp://ftp.kaist.ac.kr/pub/java/e
* China: _ftp://math01.math.ac.cn/pub/sunsite
* Japan: _ftp://ftp.glocom.ac.jp/mirror/java.sun.com/
* Sweden: _ftp://ftp.luth.se/pub/infosystems/www/hotjava/pub/
* Singapore: _ftp://ftp.iss.nus.sg/pub/java/
* United Kingdom: _ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/java/

Macintosh Installation Instructions

The file you get will be a self-extracting archive called something like JDK-1_0_2-MacOS.sea.bin. If you use Fetch or Anarchie to download it will be automatically converted into the self-extracting JDK-1_0_2-MacOS.sea. Double-click it to extract it and the double-click the resulting installer JDK-1_0_2-MacOS. It will prompt you for a location to put it on your hard disk. Put it wherever is convenient.

It may be helpful to make aliases of the Applet Viewer, the Java Compiler and the Java Runner and put them on your desktop for ease of dragging and dropping later, especially if you have a large monitor.

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