An XML toolkit for Web servers (2/5) - exploring XML

An XML toolkit for Web servers

Java on your Web server

The Java package comes in two flavors: The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) includes only the files necessary to execute Java programs while the Java Development Kit (JDK) has everything needed to compile, debug and package Java code. You want the JDK even if you do not intend to write programs because various Java server-side technologies such as Java Server Pages (JSP) make use of these development tools.

Installing the JDK on your server machine is very straight-forward: Download the JDK for your server platform Windows, Solaris or Linux directly from SUN's Java Web Site. The current version is Java 1.2.1. I would wait with Java 1.3 until most Java software packages have been tested to avoid problems with slight incompatibilities. Other platforms are also supported. If you have a Java Development Environment such as Borland JBuilder on your machine you might already have a JDK installed that came with it. You can check the version with java -version on the command line.

The Windows package comes as a self-installing executable that only need to be double-clicked. The Solaris and Linux versions are compressed tape archive files (.tar.gz) that can be extracted in any directory, usually /usr/java or /usr/local/java. The environment variable JAVA_HOME should point to this directory. JAVA_HOME/bin needs to be added to the PATH.

If you can execute java -version from any directory as a normal user on your system everything should be ready to enable servlets.

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URL: https://www.webreference.com/xml/column18/2.html
Created: Aug 27, 2000
Revised: Aug 27, 2000