Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
The Sun Microsystems Java
Software Development Kit
The Sun Microsystems Java Software Development Kit (Java SDK) is the most
basic toolkit for Java development. In some ways, it remains the most flexible.
Your understanding of Java development should include this very basic toolset,
even if you move beyond it to more “hand-holding” Integrated Development
Environments (IDEs). This chapter introduces all the major components of
the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE)
1
development kit. The Enterprise Edition
is discussed later. There is a third Java SDK (the Micro Edition) for embedded
development which we will not cover in this topic.
1. What does the “2” in “Java 2” mean? Hoo boy. Explaining product marketing names is not
always easy. There was Java 1.0. Then there were several releases of Java 1.1.x. Then Sun re-
leased Java 1.2.x, but they started calling it “Java 2”. Since then, they have released Java 1.3.x,
Java 1.4.x and they still call it “Java 2”. But it gets even more confusing. Sun is now releasing
what had been preliminarily numbered 1.5, but is now officially called the 5.0 release, though
they still call it Java 2. That's what the 2 in “J2SE” refers to. So it is Java 2 platform, version
5.0. Any questions? See
http://java.sun.com/j2se/naming_versioning_5_0.html
.
115
