A package must be installed on your computer in such a manner that it can be located by your Java development and runtime environment. There are a number of such environments. The most fundamental is Sun's free JDK. This environment provides a command line compiler and linker, but not an editor; however, other companies such as Microsoft, Inprise, and Symantec sell integrated development environments (IDEs) that include fancy editors, debuggers, and other tools common to sophisticated IDEs.
We present several approaches to installing a package, which for the purposes of this discussion we will call MyPackage. Hopefully, one of them will fit your needs. The first method is easiest, but we haven't been able to get it to work with all IDEs, perhaps because we gave up too soon or perhaps because it just wouldn't work anyway. The second, more tedious method varies with the IDE.
Please send us your experiences so that we can pass them along to others.
After installation, don't forget to include the line
import MyPackage.*;
at the top of any programs that use MyPackage.
If you write an applet, you might have trouble viewing it in the browser even though you are using the Applet tag correctly in your web page.
The following worked for me on 2/25/02. I put in the date, because by the time you read this there may be other problems.