I tried running Eclipse again this morning - I had previously added the JDK I installed so that I could browse Java sources - now it crashes on startup. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong here, but it's more trouble than it's worth. I downloaded IntelliJ to take a look at that.

First off, they have an actual installer - and when you get it installed, and create a package, it asks you which JDK you want to use. Right off, this was better than Eclipse - it worked. So anyway, I added a new project to work on, and it went ahead and indexed the JDK for me, so that browsing would be possible. That's where I hit a point I'm not following.

There are a bunch of ancillary Java libraries with sources (network, security, plugin, etc) - but the runtime - rt.jar - shows up as an unbrowseable thing. Again, I'm sure I'm missing something here, but I have no idea how to just browse the base Java libraries.

Ok, just to get a feel for the tool I go down the tree to a package that has source - ldapsec.jar. I open the tree to StartTlsResponseImpl, and select it. Nothing. Ok, I have to double click to get source. Why that is, I have no idea - seems like a bad idea to me on the usability front.

Well, on to the project I created. I select my project - and have a "what now?" moment. Yes, I know that people downloading CST NC have the same issue, which is why we have the WalkThru document. So, off to the help, and it tells me what to do - I create a new file in the project (analogous to creating a new class in a CST package, mostly). Now, a fair bit of my problem here is my burned in expectations as a Smalltalker - I really don't think about source files, and I know that this is not a problem for most developers - so this is an issue on my end, not the tool's. I do notice that there are a bunch of XML files already associated with my project - gosh knows what those are, but I'll leave those alone. So I created a simple program:

class HelloWorldApp {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!"); //Display the string.
    }
}

Hit "Build", and got a compiler error. Hmm. I suppose it's significant that the tool tells me that it can't resolve "String" - likely means I've got some configuration thing wrong. I have no idea what that might be though, so I can't really get into any of IntelliJ's refactoring - I have to figure out how to get it properly set up first.