What is the development environment?
The development environment is a set of tools installed on your computer that allows you to write Java programs (applications) and tests for them, to share the source code with your colleagues, and to compile the source and run it. We will discuss each of the development tools and stages of the development process in this chapter.
Java editor is your main tool
A Java-supporting editor is the center of a development environment. In principle, you can use any text editor to write a program and store it in a .java
file. Unfortunately, a regular text editor does not warn you about Java language syntax errors. That is why a specialized editor that supports Java is a better choice for writing Java programs.
A modern Java language editor is not just a writing tool. It also has the ability to integrate with the JVM installed on the same computer, and use it to compile the application, execute it, and much more. That is why it is called not just an editor, but an...