Hello all,

I am taking a Java class this summer at the local comm college. I would like to use my laptop for the class, Slack 9.1 installed. But I am unsure what I need to install ..... another concern is the "Java Trap" I hear about. Is there no way to avoid using some proprietary Library's or Compilers, ie. Sun's JDK. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Danielallan

Hi. If you're serious about learning Java and want to be productive and minimize your learning curve I'd suggest you come to terms with any concerns you ahve over proprietary code and just install the Sun JDK.

If you want to make life a little tougher, try using the Blackdown JDK (which is a few major versions behind IIRC).

As of Slack 9.1, the J2SDK is included (it's in the /d package), so if you did a full install or didn't explicitly deselect it during installation, you shouldn't need to install anything. Well, except for possibly an IDE, should you want that, but for a beginner I would recommend coding in an editor which doesn't do everything for you. They tend to be faster as well (most Java IDE's I've seen are written in Java, and so are painfully slow)...personally I use Kate.

And here's when the VI/Emacs war enters.

Thank you for your replies!

I have checked out the Blackdown website and have downloaded their JDK. Some questions about that; Do I need to uninstall Sun's JDK or can I keep that in place? In Windoze sometimes you can't have the same type of program made by two different companies, so I guess my question really is will Sun's JDK and Blackdown's JDK live together? Should I worry about any cross-dependancy issues?

I have been using Linux for 3 years and still don't understand some things.

Again thanks for all your help,

Daniel

I'd guess aslong as your PATH variable and JAVA_HOME points to the installation you want to use, you wouldn't have a problem.

As for incompatibilities between code in Sun's and Blackdown's implementations of java, no doubt somewhere down the line there will be somethings not implemented in both platforms, just hazarding a guess as I've never used Blackdown, but thats my gut feeling.