RE: Jave IDE (and bash question)

[Marshall, James A R]

I've done a bit of investigation now and decided to share what I discovered.
I would recommend Windows users take a look at JCreator
(http://www.jcreator.com/). It is a fast and efficient Java IDE that
complies with Windows interface guidelines and generally feels very similar
to Visual C++, which I found useful due to prior experience using that. It
integrates very well with Swarm... the Swarm.jar file was included through
one of the IDE's dialogue boxes, and I manually edited the "Path"
environment variable through Windows' control panel myself to include
javaswarm.dll. Even better, you can add other documentation sets through
another dialogue box, so I added the Swarm Javadocs and now I can highlight
a class and press Ctrl+F1 to go to the associated documentation
transparently. The IDE has some very nice features like a classview (in the
free version), as well as function completion and parameter information as
you type, and a debugger interface (in the full version). As you may have
gathered there are two versions. The basic version is free, while the full
version includes the features just mentioned above, and at 35 USD for an
academic license I'll definitely be taking some money out of the project
budget for it! I haven't tried the full version yet so will let people on
this list know if it fails to live up to expectations.

Enough advocacy... onto a support question. I've just installed Swarm 2.1.1
on my Windows 2000 Pro machine and am trying to configure Swarm to run with
the Sun JDK. I'm following threadvice from the FAQ on modifying PATH and
CLASSPATH in the .bash_login file, but they don't seem to be having any
effect. In fact I'm not sure that my .bash_login file (located in the root
of the drive I've installed Swarm to) is being looked at at all. If I try
and change the starting directory in it, that has no effect when I launch a
Swarm terminal. If I rename the file to something else, the Swarm terminal
doesn't complain when I launch it. Yes I am running bash.exe with the -login
switch, and no, there are no other .bash_login files on my system. What's
going on?
        James

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