Software Tools

Comp 401

For Comp 401 you will need to install the following on your laptop computer. Be sure that you have the latest version (non-beta test) of all these. The tools are listed in order of importance and priority. For the first programming assignment, you will use 1-2. See Tool Setup for information on how to configure each tool for use.

These are listed in approximately the order in which we will use them. The first assignment will use Java and Eclipse.

0. Sun website for documentation on Java. Don't just google on the Java classname you are looking for. You will most likely get an old version of the documentation. You need to access the documentation for Java version 1.6, http://java.sun.com/javase/6/cdocs/api/

1. Java - go to the Sun website (this is a useful link for many purposes) and install

• JRE (Java Runtime Environment) - version 6 Update 3 (as of 8/2007).
• JDK (Java Development Kit) - version 6 Update 3 (as of 8/2007)

2. Eclipse - Select 'Eclipse IDE for Java Developers.' This is the industry standard IDE - version Eclipse SDK 3.2.1 (as of 11/20/2006)

• Official Eclipse tutorial - This is the essential tutorial for you to read. Read Parts 1 and 2 to get started with Eclipse. Parts 3 and 4 may be read little by little as you get familiar with using Eclipse. Part 5 is optional (I advocate using a logging tool for debugging rather than an interactive debugger).
• Eclipse tutorial - a supplementary tutorial you may or may not find useful
• another Eclipse tutorial - a supplementary tutorial you may or may not find useful

3. JUnit test framework - version 4.4 (as of 8/2007)

• Tutorial on using JUnit - this describes jUnit 3.8. To use version 4 of jUnit, use annotations (e.g. @Test, @Before and @After) as in the JUnit skeleton below.
• Skeleton for JUnit testing
• TestLinkedList.java - example of JUnit testing.
• Overview of JUnit with Eclipse - note that this is written for jUnit version 3. Version 4 of JUnit uses annotations (e.g. @Test, @Before and @After) as in the JUnit skeleton above.
• Overview of the design of JUnit - Note that this describes an older version of JUnit but is still useful.

4. Javadoc - this is part of the Sun Java release but see Tool Setup for getting javadoc to work within Eclipse.