Let's take a look at our Java development environment. We are using the Eclipse IDE, the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment. This tool provides a lot to us to track away some of the details of building a job application. Now, entering source code is certainly detailed enough, but when you have to worry about lining up curly braces, when you have to also see how your variables are declared and look for ending semi-colons, it can start to be a lot. This product actually helps us quite a bit. You can, see first of all, we get some text highlighting, so all of the Java keywords are highlighted and also some of the variables that we have highlighted such as this quant variable, we can see here it's italicized. So we can't trace it all the way through. We also get some tips. If we see some ideas, we get these little light bulbs which give us some tips so. We can go through there. We obviously get these line numbers. Over here in this Package Explorer, we can see one of the outlines of our Java project, and also we can see there's an outline view over here which helps us quickly navigate. You can just click on this quant right here on the outline, it'll take us right up here. If we want to go to getQuant here, we can click over here and it'll bring us right to it and that helps us navigate. We also have our console output. This product actually provides a lot and as far as running and executing, you can certainly execute it right here in our development environment simply by clicking right on our Java class and then going to our Run As menu here and selecting Java Application and we will see some output here. We don't have any output yet, but we'll begin to see some output here in the console. When we're ready, we can close the console again. There is no mixing up which output is the latest output. Another thing that we get from our integrated development environment is we get completion help. We can see here, we can begin to type one of our Java objects, which we will learn about. If we just click on our dot character here, we can see a drop-down list of what methods and properties are available. In this case, I know that I want to be able to call a set function, so I can begin to type "Set." In this case, I know I want it to be setQuantity and you can see here that it actually gives us some guidance about what to pass in. I can double-click here and I can put an actual number in there, an integer number, so we can put a number in here and we get an indicator that that line is good. That actually helps a lot. Sometimes it's called code completion. It's a very visual type of development environment. We can also get some assistance when we want to retrieve some information. We know here that we can set up a local data variable and again, we can call our Java object, which we'll be talking quite a bit and we can call another method right here. Where does that method come from? Well, it's the getQuant and the setQuantity right up here. You can see them. We can see where it's declared in the Java code up here and we can see where it's used. What we're going to do now is just delete the rest of this. Instead of you watching me type this all in, we can enter it right here and we can see here that we have an error. So we have to say to ourselves, "Okay, what could be causing this error?" We can go back immediately and debug it. For now, I'll just do something called comment it out. What we'll do is we'll hard code this up here and now we don't have any errors. What I did was we do have to eventually set this up correctly but for right now, that'll be fine. We'll just figure out if this is working as is, and then we'll determine the best way to resolve the issue. We save that. Again, I'm going to click here on our Java application and we're going to run as a Java application. We can see here we're actually getting some output. This can help us understand what we're doing and where in the application we need to add a code or where we might have a problem, different ways to resolve it. You can see here we picked one way. Once we have something running, it's much easier to go in and improve it. This was just a little bit about our Java development environment and how useful it is. This is something that we will be using throughout this course and our series of courses. I think you'll agree that this environment is quite useful.
