Friday 19 February 2016

Java Tutorial 1 - Setting up

This Tutorial
In this tutorial we will download and install the programs we need to do java development. We will be using the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

What you need
Eclipse
Java Development Kit (JDK)

Downloading Eclipse
Eclipse is a software tool which we can use to write, test and run Java code. You can download it from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. The one you want is the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers.
This will give you a ZIP which you then need to extract onto your desktop. Within the extracted folder will be the eclipse app. Don't open this yet, first we need the JDK!

Downloading the JDK
The latest JDK at the time of writing (February 2016) is version 8. This may be different when you read this. You can download the JDK from Oracle's website. You need to accept the agreement and then download the package suitable for your OS. Follow the instructions to install the JDK.

Setting up Eclipse
Now open up Eclipse from the folder you extracted earlier. You will be presented to choose a workspace location like so
You can choose any location for this, this is where your files will be stored.
Once Eclipse has loaded you will have a Welcome screen. Close this screen (near the top right of the window there will be a welcome tab with an X button). You should now have a main window with a pane on each of the left, right and bottom of the screen.

The Eclipse UI

The pane on the left is the Project Navigator, which should be empty at the moment. This is where your files will be once you have some!
The bottom is your error logs, consoles and other tabs. We will learn what each does in a later tutorial. On the right side you will have "outline" and "task list". You can close one or both of these if you like

That's it for this tutorial, next time we'll start some code!

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