SWING - Environment Setup

This section guides you on how to download and set up Java on your machine. Please use the following steps to set up the environment.

Java SE is freely available from the link Download Java. Hence, you can 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 have installed Java on your machine, you would need to set the environment variables to point to the correct installation directories.

Setting Up the Path for Windows 2000/XP

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

Step 1 − Right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'Properties'.

Step 2 − Click the 'Environment variables' button under the 'Advanced' tab.

Step 3 − 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 −

Step 1 − 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 '.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 IDE 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 − Netbeans is a Java IDE that is open source and free, which can be downloaded from https://www.netbeans.org/index.html.
• Eclipse − Eclipse is also a Java IDE developed by the Eclipse open source community and can be downloaded from https://www.eclipse.org/.
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