Welcome

Hey guys,

As you all know, I have always wanted to write a Java applet tutorial, and many people have been waiting for it. But the tut has been delayed for so long. Simply because I didn't really know what I should include in the tutorial.

Basically an applet is just a Java application. So to solve it you just need to know Java. Therefore instead of a tutorial I decided to create a blog for it. Hopefully you'll find everything you need about Java here :)

In this first post I would like to equip you with all the tools and resources needed for solving Java applets.

Firstly to run Java applets you will need the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). It might have been shipped with your browser but it's always good to have the latest version. You can check your current version by typing this from a console:

java -version

But probably you will not just want to run Java applets, but to compile Java programs as well, to understand what the applets actually do. For this you will need the Java Development Kit (JDK), which also includes the JRE.

You can get the JDK from here: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp. At the moment JDK 6 is what you need.

Java programs are compiled into Java bytecode, and you will need a decompiler to decompile the code back to Java language. There are many Java decompilers out there but jad is probably the best one. Most others decompilers use jad as the backend. The jad homepage is at http://www.kpdus.com/jad.html. You can also find the graphical frontends for jad and plugins for IDEs there too.

Talking about IDEs.. basically you can write Java programs using any text editor but a good IDE will make things easier. Here are the IDEs that I recommend:

• JCreator: http://www.jcreator.com - an excellent lightweight IDE, get this if you are learning Java. Unfortunately it only runs on the Windows platform.
• Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org - an excellent heavyweight IDE, but probably you should not use it as a beginner, because it hides you from many essential things.
• Netbeans: http://www.netbeans.org - also a heavyweight IDE offering similar features to Eclipse, but I prefer Eclipse because it's faster.
  

OK, now you basically have all the necessary things. It's time to start learning Java. Of course I'll help you but here are some resources that you'll probably find useful along the way:

• The Java Tutorials: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial. This covers the basic Java language and essential classes. Very good for beginners.
• The Java Language Specification: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls. This covers in-depth knowledge about the Java language. Read this and maybe you can become a Java guru ;)
• The Java API Reference: http://java.sun.com/reference/api. You can look for any Java class/method here.