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Designed for educators and students, Ready is a complete Java development environment designed to be fast to learn and easy to administer.


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What is Ready to Program with JavaTM Technology?

Easy to Use
Easy to Administer
Low Hardware Requirements
Educator Useful Features

Since 1986 Holt Software has been supporting computer science educators with software, resources, and technical assistance. Over the last few years, the growing popularity of Java in business and industry has created the need for a Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports educational goals. That IDE is Ready!

Ready to Program with JavaTM Technology (developed by Holt Software and supported by IBM) is an easy to learn and easy to administer Java IDE specifically designed for education. This student-friendly IDE provides the power of Java without the confusing complexity of many industrial development environments. Ready allows instructors to focus on concepts rather than the environment itself.

Easy to Use

Ready has been designed to allow students to write their first programs, get their first errors, fix them, and execute their programs within twenty minutes of their first programming lesson.

Ready makes this possible because unnecessary complexities have been removed from the environment. For example, Ready dispenses with the "Project" paradigm. Students can write their programs (with a variety of modifiable skeleton frameworks). They hit F1 and the program runs.

Ready's button bar provides a good example of our design philosophy. Most IDEs contain a toolbar with 20-30 icons for various commands. What we discovered, however, is that even after a year of using other Java environments, most students had no idea which icons represented which commands. Instead, they went "tooltip hunting" every time they needed to locate a command and many never used the button bar at all! We believe students should be writing programs...not spending time hunting through the IDE. Ready provides a button bar with text buttons that tell the student which commands they activate.

Easy to Administer

The best designed Java environment can still be frustrating to use if installation is difficult and time consuming. Ready is designed to install as easily as possible. The installer is a single executable and installs without placing files all over the system. The installer contains all of the components (development environment, compiler, Java Virtual machine) for writing programs. Students and administrators don't have to worry about interference with other IDEs and compatibility issues with Java versions. Ready stands by itself.

Ready also creates a special directory included in the IDEs CLASSPATH that allows instructors to provide students with easy-to-access files and packages. Students don't even have to know how CLASSPATH works to download and use instructor files and packages.

Low Hardware Requirements

Ready is designed to run on a 486 with 16MB of RAM using Windows 95 or later. In other words, if it runs Windows 95, it should run Ready. No more having to support one IDE for most of the students and JDK for the unlucky 10%. Of course, Ready runs on Windows 95/98/ME/NT 4.0/2000.

Educator Useful Features

Ready contains a full slate of features useful for educators. Ready includes syntax coloring to help catch misspellings and unterminated comments. It indents programs at the touch of a key. It has the ability to import skeleton frameworks and code blocks into student programs (both, of course, fully customizable by the teacher). We've included simple features like 2-up printing (2 pages in landscape mode per page) to help lower paper usage.

As an extra feature, Ready also includes the hsa package, a group of classes that support easy input and output using a Console class as well as classes for reading and writing from standard input and output and ASCII text files. No more having to teach exception handing to read an integer or the DecimalFormat class to output a currency figure!

TM indicates registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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