Originally posted by Michael A:
My daughter is starting a computer course in a couple of weeks and one of the textbooks she was asked to read in advance is the Java tome mentioned above. It comes with a CD, which has three programs:- Borland Jbuilder 3, University Edition
- Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition
- NetBeans DeveloperX2 2.1
None of these will work on a Mac. The documentation says NetBeans will, but it won't. I'm guessing it's OS X only.
What are the options? Do we accept reality and buy her a PC notebook to replace her iBook, or is there Mac software that will do the same thing as these programs? I would appreciate some help.
Both
netbeans and
jbuilder are "integrated development environments" aka IDE's. Useful, but not essential. I've done java development on the mac (under 9.x) using MPW, BBEdit, and Apple's own tools that come with the 1.1.8 java that was available at the time.
Java 2 (also referred to as jdk 1.2 on up), is quite frankly imposssible under OS 9. It just isn't there. The distribution on the CD is for x86 platforms.
But lets look at what your daughter will be learning...
* fundamentals of the java language and framework
* object oriented design and methodologies
For those, the best resources she can have is (imho)
*good books
*good teachers
*web access to get the skinny at sites such as java.sun.com
Also, in my toolkit, another item (which isn't addressed by any of the software provided on the CD you mentioned) is a decent object oriented analysis and design program (ood/ooa). I highly recommend
ObjectPlant on the Mac (and still one of my favorite tools, no holds bared).
Will she run into "stumbling blocks" using OS 9 for java development? In a word, yes. Most noteably the collections framework (she'll find out more about that later). Even that isn't a huge problem, an identical package was released and made available by Sun for the 1.x java environments (url escapes me at the moment, but you should be able to find it on their site).
If I were to recommend anything, simply have her get a copy of OS X (which should run fine on her iBook, but may take some getting used to assuming she has adequate ram and disk space). Since she's going to school for this, she may qualify for student pricing on OS X (as well as other software) as well. Go ahead and use it!
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