Computer Science, University of Richmond 2005
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Java Programming for Windows XP Users
All of the software we use in CMSC 150 and CMSC 221 is freely available for the Windows plat-
form.
Obtaining the Free Software
You can get the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) which contains javac (the compiler), java (the
command to run a Java program), various other programming tools such as javadoc, plus docu-
mentation and the netBeans IDE at no charge.
The current version of the J2SE is 1.5, and the current version of netBeans is 4.1. J2SE 1.5 bun-
dled with netBeans 4.1 is a 128MB download; J2SE by itself is 56MB. The Java documentation is
another 44MB. If you have the space, go to Sun’s web site and download the JDK 1.2.
http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/download-windows.html
You will have to agree to a user license, which you should read before agreeing. Save the down-
load in a temporary directory like C:\temp. Also download the documentation if you want. This
will allow you to look up information on classes in the library without going across the Internet to
get to Sun’s online copy. Downloading the documentation is not essential if you have limited disk
space.
Installation Issues
The installation instructions are found here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/install-windows.html
Installation is more or less automated. You can follow the basic installation procedure and install
the files in the default location or you can create a directory like C:\java and install in
C:\java\j2se1.5.0. I personally prefer having a special Java directory, primarily because in the past
there were certain IDEs and third party libraries that had problems with pathnames containing
spaces, but most of those problems should be history by now. However, if you do end up install-
ing third party libraries, it is nice to have everything in one place. For the rest of this discussion I
will assume that you installed in C:\Program Files\java\jdk1.5.0. I will refer to this as the “instal-
lation directory.” After installation you can delete the file you downloaded.
After installing the programs you will need to set some environmental variables so the operating
system can find the javac and java commands and the programs can find any additional java
libraries you might install.
The two key environmental variables to set are Path and CLASSPATH.
After the JDK is installed, right-click “My Computer” and select “Properties.” In the window that
appears, select the “Advanced” tab. Near the bottom of the resulting window, click the “Environ-
ment variables” tab. You can also check this from a Command Prompt window by typing the
command
set
and look to see if you can find Path and CLASSPATH among the list of values. There will be
two windows, one with the environment variable values for the system as a whole and one for
additions for the current user. If you are on a single user machine, it doesn’t make a lot of differ-
ence which one of these you modify. For our current purposes, look through the values in both
