Java - Environment Setup

Before we proceed further, it is important that we set up the Java environment correctly. This section guides you on how to download and set up Java on your machine. Please follow the following steps to set up the environment.

Java SE is freely available from the link Download Java. So you download a version based on your operating system.

Follow the instructions to download Java and run the .exe to install Java on your machine. Once you installed Java on your machine, you would need to set environment variables to point to correct installation directories:

Setting up the path for windows 2000/XP:

Assuming you have installed Java in c:\Program Files\java\jdk directory:

• Right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'Properties'.
• Click on the 'Environment variables' button under the 'Advanced' tab.
• Now, alter the 'Path' variable so that it also contains the path to the Java executable. Example, if the path is currently set to 'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32', then change your path to read 'C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32;c:\Program Files\java\jdk\bin'.

Setting up the path for windows 95/98/ME:

Assuming you have installed Java in c:\Program Files\java\jdk directory:

• Edit the 'C:\autoexec.bat' file and add the following line at the end: 'SET PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files\java\jdk\bin'

Setting up the path for Linux,UNIX,Solaris,FreeBSD:

Environment variable PATH should be set to point to where the Java binaries have been installed. Refer to your shell documentation if you have trouble doing this.

Example, if you use bash as your shell, then you would add the following line to the end of your '.bashrc: export PATH=/path/to/java:$PATH'

Popular Java Editors:

To write your Java programs, you will need a text editor. There are even more sophisticated IDEs available in the market. But for now, you can consider one of the following:

• Notepad: On Windows machine, you can use any simple text editor like Notepad (Recommended for this tutorial), TextPad.
• Netbeans:Is a Java IDE that is open-source and free which can be downloaded fromhttp://www.netbeans.org/index.html.
• Eclipse: Is also a Java IDE developed by the eclipse open-source community and can be downloaded from http://www.eclipse.org/.

What is Next?

Next chapter will teach you how to write and run your first Java program and some of the important basic syntaxes in Java needed for developing applications.

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