Questions and Exercises: The Platform Environment

Questions

1. A programmer installs a new library contained in a .jar file. In order to access the library from his code, he sets the CLASSPATH environment variable to point to the new .jar file. Now he finds that he gets an error message when he tries to launch simple applications:

java Hello
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Hello

In this case, the Hello class is compiled into a .class file in the current directory — yet the java command can't seem to find it. What's going wrong?

Exercises

1. Write an application, PersistentEcho, with the following features:

• If PersistentEcho is run with command line arguments, it prints out those arguments. It also saves the string printed out to a property, and saves the property to a file called PersistentEcho.txt
• If PersistentEcho is run with no command line arguments, it looks for an environment variable called PERSISTENTECHO. If that variable exists, PersistentEcho prints out its value, and also saves the value in the same way it does for command line arguments.
• If PersistentEcho is run with no command line arguments, and the PERSISTENTECHO environment variable is not defined, it retrieves the property value from PersistentEcho.txt and prints that out.

Check your answers.