Chapter 8. Java Development Tools

Sun's implementation of Java includes a number of tools for Java developers. Chief among these are the Java interpreter and the Java compiler, of course, but there are a number of others as well. This chapter documents most tools shipped with the JDK. Notable omissions are the RMI and IDL tools that are specific to enterprise programming and which are documented in Java Enterprise in a Nutshell (O'Reilly).

The tools documented here are part of Sun's development kit; they are implementation details and not part of the Java specification itself. If you are using a Java development environment other than Sun's JDK, you should consult your vendor's tool documentation.

Some examples in this chapter use Unix conventions for file and path separators. If Windows is your development platform, change forward slashes in filenames to backward slashes, and colons in path specifications to semicolons.