Our Programming Environment:
Editors, the Console Window and IDEs
Once on the Linux machine, feel free to use whatever you're comfortable with, but when in simple edit-compile-run mode I recommend (and will use for editing) either vi (in PuTTY or an X-Win32 console window) or the Kate editor (when working directly from the X-Win32 desktop).
A PuTTY or X-Win32 console window is very handy for quickly editing, compiling and running test programs for single Java classes, or even more complex Java programs.
Under Windows XP you also have a choice of editors, including Vim (an enhanced version of vi) and even Microsoft's Edit and Notepad. And, of course, you also have the console window in which to compile and run Java programs.
Note that these scenarios are a far cry from using an "IDE" (Integrated Development Environment), but when you are first learning a language there is something to be said for dealing hands-on with the actual source code at the lowest level.
There are now many IDEs available for use in developing Java software, from the very powerful (and very complex) like Eclipse and NetBeans to the much simpler (like JCreator and BlueJ). As the course progresses I hope we will be able to look at using one of these IDEs (Eclipse), once we are familiar and comfortable with the basic tools and procedures in a simpler context. Eclipse is available on both the campus Windows desktop and our Linux machine, and you can easily download and install it on your home machine if you wish.
There are many other tools available nowadays to the software developer (Microsoft Visio for producing UML diagrams, for example) and we shall talk about some of those as well.