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 book.

^[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 released 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.