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Tools & Products
You can download the reference JDK from Sun's website for free at http://java.sun.com/ products/jdk/1.2 and you should keep it available during development, if only for purposes of comparison. In general, the JDK represents "Java according to Sun", which means that issues not covered in the specification might be gathered from the accompanying HTML API documentation, or from the behavior of JDK-compiled and executed Java code. IBM has put a lot of effort into promoting Java, and has released a bunch of freely available tools, such as a preliminary implementation of the Java Speech API. One particularly useful tool is their Java compiler, which can be used in addition to JDK's javac to check for potential compiler issues, found at http://www.research.ibm.com/jikes. Notably, Jikes is available as open source. IBM is also offering commercial products, like its Visual Age IDE for Java. A commercial product to compile Java to native code that supports many platforms is TowerJ, as http://www.towerj.com. Tools like this are a valuable fallback if you want to prototype and develop in Java, but you are afraid of the performance penalty. A similar commercial product, albeit based on open source, is Cygnus' egcs/gcc-based GCJ: http://www.cygnus.com/client_services/java.html http://sourceware.cygnus.com/java/gcj.html Cygnus is also offering a Java-capable IDE, the Source Navigator, at http://www.cygnus.com. Unfortunately, Cygnus's Java products are not yet integrated with their PlayStation2 development kit, so there is no readily available solution to get Java ported to a console. A potentially very interesting solution for game developers aiming for a tailor-made VM with low memory footprint is Transvirtual's Kaffe Open Source JVM, at http://www.transvirtual.com, which can be modified and adapted to your needs and is available for licensing at reasonable conditions. It is a clean-room implementation of Java that has received quite a bit of acclaim, and it is definitely worth a look if you are wary of making yourself dependant on black-box, third-party tools. Microsoft, recently forced by court order to support JNI, offers its own line of Java related tools http://www.microsoft.com/java. |
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Features
