Item Subject: JAVA
Hi Joe,
 
There are three Java Integrated Development Environments for the Mac right now.
One I'm not too familiar with, but the others are Symantec's Cafe for Mac and
Metrowerks Learn Programming with Java.  I have used neither, though I'm
familiar with Cafe on Windows.  The Mac version of Cafe is a bit more primitive
and does not yet have support for 68K Macs or the fancy debugger.  these issues
should be resolved by the end of this month.  Metrowerks is the premier compiler
maker for the Macintosh these days.  Virtually all Mac applications are now
developed with their tools, so I would think their package would be a very good
one.  Both packages sell for $99 right now.  Cafe is available for purchase and
download electronically so there is an instant gratification advantage there :-)
Cafe for Windows at lease includes fairly good online documentation, certainly
enough to figure everything out if that's what you have to do.  The files are
installed on the hard disk from CDROM, so a CDROM is not required after
installation.  This information, plus access to the comp.lang.java newsgroup
should be all anyone would need.  Whether this same information is included in
the Mac version of Cafe I don't know for sure.  Also, I don't know whether the
Metrowerks product includes printed or electronic documentation (Cafe includes
virtually *no* paper documentation, so you wouldn't be missing anything here.  I
believe that the Metrowerks product currently does support 68K Macs (in addition
to PowerPC based systems).  Both packages recommend 16Mb of memory.  You can get
information at the companies web sites:
 
http://cafe.symantec.com/
 
  and
 
http://www.metrowerks.com/
 
Hope this helps,
 
Gavin