Development Tools

Most stages of the Java development in Phase II employed Java Development Kit (JDK) v1.1.5 and v1.1.6. This required the use of less commonly available of browsers and viewers. Applet construction was primarily done using Beans Development Kit (BDK) v1.0 . There were a number of distinct releases from November'97 to March'98 which were used. BDK offers a relatively simple Beans building environment called BeanBox; this tool was crude and occasionally behaved unpredictably. However it was one of the few tools available which reliably produced applets that worked satisfactorily.

JavaStudio v1.0 offered the preferred component construction environment. Its interface was most intuitive and provided features that could be adapted for use in the classroom. However it proved to have several problems which could not be overcome until late in Phase II including not producing working applets. Regardless, it is JavaStudio's graphic user interface (GUI) which provided the model for part of this project's assessment process (see section 5.2).