Beginner’s Guide to Web Development – Installing the JDK

Your system’s environment must be properly configured before you can begin developing for the web. The next few sections of the guide explain the steps required to set up your environment, starting with this section on downloading the appropriate files needed to compile and execute programs written in the Java programming language. After you have installed the files you are to download, you will have the ability to write and execute a variety of Java programs, including applets, applications, and standalone Java classes. These files also server as the backbone for running a JSP engine on your machine, which we will cover later.

Let's get started with the Java installation. Start up your favorite web browser, and point it to the following URL:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/downloads.html

Here you will find a list of current releases for the Java platform standard edition (J2SE), standard development kit (SDK). From this point onward, we will refer to this kit as the JDK (Java Development Kit). Properly installing and configuring the JDK gives you the ability to create programs that rely on the standard features of the Java programming language. As of this writing, the most current non-beta release of the JDK is version . Thus, click on the link by this name.

The next page asks you to select the proper download for your operating system. Since this tutorial is written for Microsoft Windows operating systems, you will need to download the SDK correpsonding to Microsoft Windows.

Clicking on this link should bring up a licensing agreement. If you agree to the terms of the agreement, you can click the accept button located near the bottom of the screen. This will bring up a page with a list of available download locations and protocols. Your two options for protocols are FTP and HTTP. Select HTTP in this case. FTP could give you some problems if you are behind a firewall, which may be blocking port traffic on the standard FTP port, so HTTP is your safest bet.

After clicking the HTTP button, a pop-up window should appear. Select the "save" option and choose a directory in which to save the file. For example, the file to save should be or something similar. Save it in the directory of your choosing, for example, c:\My Download Files, or any directory you usually save files you download from the web.

This file is relatively large and could take quite some time to download depending on the speed of your connection.

After the download of the file is complete, go to the directory in which you opted for the file to be saved, and open the file. For example, if you chose to save to the c:\downloads directory under your Windows operating system, navigate to this directory and double-click the file. This will bring up an installer program. The only part of the installer that may require your interaction is part in which it asks for a location for your installation. For example, the default in the Microsoft Windows case is c:\.

For purposes of this tutorial, we will assume you have chosen the default installation values. You should have no need to make any changes to the rest of the installer’s suggestions. After given the okay to proceed, the installer takes care of copying the files you downloaded to the appropriate directories.

After you have completed the above steps, the files that make up the JDK are contained within your machine. It may be a good idea to restart your computer after the installation so that any registry changes made by the installer can take effect. Now that you have gotten the installation out of the way, it’s time to move on to the next step of the guide, which covers testing your JDK installation.