Introduction - JavaTech: An Introduction to Scientific and Technical Computing with Java - page 16

hand to debug a problem or tweak the appearance of a layout. You then obviously
need to understand the details of graphics programming.
For editing the source code, we recommend a language sensitive editor that
color codes the Java text so that the language keywords and symbols are high-
lighted. This helps to avoid simple spelling mistakes and assists with debugging.
Chapter 1 in the Web Course provides links to several freeware and commercial
editors.
The appletviewer program that comes with the SDK provides an ideal
tool for applet debugging. As we discuss later, browsers do not provide a good
environment in which to debug applet code except near the end of the development
process.
1.7.2 Documentation
The Java language elements available from Sun currently fall into these two broad
categories:
Core language - This refers to the set of packages and classes that must be available
in the JVM for a particular edition (see Section 1.3) regardless of the platform.
Optional APIs -Anumber of useful Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are
available from Sun for audio and video applications, 3D graphics, and several other
areas. However, they are not part of the core language so may not be available for all
platforms.
These elements now involve an enormous number of packages, classes and meth-
ods. So access to documentation is essential. Sun provides a large set of docu-
mentation freely available on its site at http://java.sun.com .
If you do not have continual online web access, we recommend that you
download from the http://java.sun.com site a copy of the Java 2 Platform,
Standard Edition API specifications for the latest version of Java. This set of web
pages provides detailed descriptions of all the packages, classes, and methods
in the core language. You will frequently refer to this documentation to find out
what exactly a given method does, what methods are available for a given class,
and to obtain other useful information.
Note that the online documentation indicates what version of Java a class
or method appeared in the core language (where this is not explicit, assume it
came with Version 1.0). This is important if you want to write a program that is
consistent with, for example, version 1.1.
1.7.3 Code compatibility
In this course we primarily use code consistent with version 1.4 or higher. We
note those places where we do not. Currently (circa 2004) many browsers in use
still only run applets with Java 1.1 compatibility. For such browsers, Sun provides