Where Oh Where Are Runtime and System ?

[eBob.com]

Well I am now on page 84 of Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java". (... having
made significant progress since the help you guys gave me in response to my
last question about page 34.)

Here he presents a simple program which uses two classes, System and
Runtime. And he suggests using packages.html to find those two classes. He
says "If you look at the packages.html file, you'll see a list of all the
different class libraries that come with Java."

After digging around a bit I found packages.html. It takes me to
J2EE1.4SDK\docs\api\index.html which shows me in the upper left window "All
Classes", but then under that "Packages", and the listed packages are things
like com.sun.appser.... The frame in the lower left shows "All Classes",
starting with AccessLocalEx.... The main part of the window is titled
"Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition, v 1.4 / Sun Java System Application
Server v 8.0 / Platform Edition / API Specifications". I am unable to find
System and Runtime classes anywhere.

Note that the program compiles just fine. So the System and Runtime classes
are there.

Did I mess up by downloading J2EE rather than J2SE? From the descriptions I
saw of these two "things" (what is the right term?) I thought that J2EE
would be superset of the stuff in J2SE. And I thought I would need the
stuff in J2EE (which J2SE does not have) fairly soon.

Can anyone tell me how to find java.lang (where System and Runtime are
supposed to live)? And, btw, whats the difference between a class library
and a package?

Thanks, Bob

[Ryan Stewart]

"eBob.com" <eB******@totallybogus.com> wrote in message
news:0n****************@fe10.lga...
[...]

Did I mess up by downloading J2EE rather than J2SE? From the descriptions I
saw of these two "things" (what is the right term?) APIs would fit.
I thought that J2EE
would be superset of the stuff in J2SE. And I thought I would need the
stuff in J2EE (which J2SE does not have) fairly soon. Superset, yes. But J2EE does not include J2SE, just as the opposite.
Can anyone tell me how to find java.lang (where System and Runtime are
supposed to live)? J2SE
And, btw, whats the difference between a class library
and a package?

"Class library" is not a very concrete term. It is a collection of classes made
to do something. "Library" is meant to imply that it is a conglomeration of many
useful bits. A (Java) package, on the other hand, is very specifically a group
of related classes. The concepts are somewhat similar, I suppose, but entirely
different to someone familiar with them. In a sense, all of J2SE is one big
class library. I think there's around 2000 different classes in it, grouped into
a couple hundred packages. All of them are useful for something. At the same
time, though, you might call the javax.swing package itself a class library as
it contains many useful classes for creating GUIs.

In the future, please post to comp.lang.java.help. There is much more activity
and your questions will be answered more quickly there. This group is
deprecated.