Articles : JavaBoutique's Introduction to Java :
Installing the Java Development Kit :

Installing the JDK

Once you have downloaded the self-extracting archive, you should execute it (typically by double clicking on it). When you do so, the install program will walk you through an installation of the JDK on your local machine. Here is what it looked like when I started Install Shield.

In order to keep your hard disk organized, I recomend installing the JDK in a top level folder like "C:\Java\Sun\JDK_VERSION" becuse it is likely that you will get other "Java-centric" libraries and development kits in the future.

When the installation program is done working, you should have the JDK installed on your machine. Here is what my directory structure looked like after I installed it:

However, you are not done yet! Unfortunately, though the latest version of the JDK is 1.2.2, that does not mean you can actually use JDK 1.2.2 to build web applications. In fact, if you want to achieve backwards compatibility across the standrad browsers (IE and Netscape) for applets, you are going to have to go back years of development and settle for development with the JDK 1.02.

The JDK 1.2.2 is a great set of tools, and you should download it and learn to use it so that you can use it for your server-side Java development. But for most situations, the use of anything more recent than JDK 1.02 should be restricted to the server side (java applications, java servlets or java servers) because the browsers do not universally understand the newer java resources included with JDK 1.2.2.

Browsers will eventually catch up and users will eventually upgrade, but until they do, it is best to keep your applets as simple as possible in order to make sure they can be used.

Thus, after you have downloaded and installed JDK 1.2.2, do the same thing for JDK1.02.

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Selena Sol contributes to the JavaBoutique's Introduction to Java. Selena curently works for Barclays Capital in London, one of the leading global investment banks in Europe and has worked as a software developer for the National Center for Human Genome research, Microline Software, Neuron Data, and Electric Eye in Singapore. Selena is perhaps best-known for creating the Public Domain Web Script Archive (Extropia) and writing several books on Web Programming (Perl, CGI, Java).
Email: selena@extropia.com

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