Java is a popular programming language written by Sun Microsystems. It's an object-oriented language that runs inside a "virtual machine" which, at least in theory, allows code to run on many different machines. The Java home page is http://java.sun.com/; you can download a developer kit or run-time from there. Java per se is a proprietary product, but there are many free projects that aim to provide all (or part) of the Java environment as Free Software. http://www.dwheeler.com/java-imp.html lists many of those projects.

Here's a cute hack to enable token substitution in java property files: http://www.sys-con.com/java/source.cfm?id=1228

See also: JavaProgrammingBookmarks

When I tried to run Sun's JDK 1.3.1 on Debian Sid (in March 2002) I got the following error: /home/tcabot/local/Linux/jdk/bin/i386/native_threads/java: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory. This can be solved by linking to the existing libstdc++, i.e. ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2.

Java is a proprietary language (controlled by Sun) but there are a few Free implementations of the compiler, JVM, and class libraries. If you're running a new version of Debian you can apt-get gcj and kaffe.

$ gcj -C HelloWorldApp.java
$ kaffe -addclasspath . HelloWorldApp

-- TobyCabot - 28 Dec 2001-19 Mar 2002