Help finding a Programming Environment

Hello all,

I am not a programmer/developer, but rather a high school teacher that is trying to iron out the kinks in our computer programming course sequence. One such major kink is the introduction of Java, according to the new Advanced Placement curriculum.

The problem is this, we will soon teach four different languages; QBasic, Pascal, C++, and Java. Now, I know that QBasic and Pascal are so old you are probably shaking your head in disbelief, but my colleagues (who have been doing this for much longer than I have) assure me that they have found these languages to be the best starting point for the children in their venture into programming.

Anyway, I am ideally trying to find a programming environment which will allow me to compile and run programs in all four of these languages. If not, then a reasonable Java IDE would suffice. However, I should point out that we are using Pentium 200 machines with 32MB Ram running Win 95. As of now, there is no way to upgrade these machines through the district, so I have to find software to run on them.

I would appreciate any suggestions as to software that would not necessarily run on these machines (as I am currently approaching a few companies about equipment donations).

Thank you in advance for any help and insight you can offer.

Bill
billducky@hotmail.com

Bill,

I've been searching around for IDEs that may possibly work on those system configurations, and unfortunately, I haven't had much success yet.

IDEs I've taken a look at are:

NetBeans
Sun ONE Studio (Formerly Forte)
JBuilder

The lowest system config I found was P2's with 128mb RAM running on Windows XP/NT/2000.

I'll keep looking, but I'm not hopeful that you'll find an IDE that will run on those machines. You may have to resort to a notepad editor of sorts.

Bill,

Hi! Check out the Java IDE called JCreator. The Lite Edition is Freeware and is under 3MB (you will need to get the Java SDK seperately). It is pretty basic and doesn't offer a GUI builder. However, it works with Windows 95. I have seen other sites that say it only requires a 133-MHz CPU and 32MB of RAM.