Java Reference
In-Depth Information
was to be Developer 3.0. In October 1999 NetBeans was acquired by Sun Mi-
crosystems. After some additional development, Sun released the Forte for Java
Community Edition IDE—the same IDE that had been in beta as NetBeans
Developer 3.0. There had always been interest in going Open Source at Net-
Beans. In June 2000, Sun open-sourced the NetBeans IDE; now it can be
found at the
netbeans.org
Web site.
10.2.2
NetBeans can be downloaded from the
netbeans.org
Web site. You will want
the NetBeans “IDE” and
not
the NetBeans “platform.” The IDE is the fully
featured Java development environment. The platform is the underlying core
of NetBeans on top of which one can develop other tools—for example, IDEs
for other languages. Installation of the IDE consists of only three steps:
Installing NetBeans
1. Download.
2. Install.
3. Execute.
10.2.2.1
The first step is to get the software downloaded onto your system. From the
netbeans.org
Web site, navigate your way to a download of the latest IDE.
The prepackaged “installers” might work—but if they fail, you have no infor-
mation as to why, and still less as to what you can do about it. We'll act like
“real programmers” and download an archive file. (Here “archive” means a
collection of software compressed for easier transmission, not “archive” in the
sense of “old documents.”) Click on a link to begin the download
(you'll need to read, review, and accept the license agreement to proceed).
The result should be a file on your system named something like
NetBeansIDE-release35.tar.bz2
.
Downloading
10.2.2.2
The installation consists of three steps: untarring the file, adjusting a parameter
in a configuration file, then creating a symbolic link for easy startup.
2
Installing
2. Thanks to John Zoetebier from New Zealand for his contribution on the NetBeans users
mailing list, on which this manual installation procedure is based.
