Hi there:

I am a high school teacher. My school is greatly in need of a free program that will compile Java in Windows without going into DOS and without going into the Command line.

If there is no such thing free, perhaps my school could negotiate with the software company.

I don't teach the programming class myself, but our principal has asked all of us to help in finding this.

Would anyone who knows of such a thing please point me in the correct direction to obtain it?

Thank you so much.

Laurion

There are a few:
http://www.borland.com/jbuilder/
http://wwws.sun.com/software/sundev/jde/
http://forte.sun.com/ffj/index.html (Free)
Also I would suggest using Dietel & Dietel, Java: How To Program 4th or 5th edition.
Very good book and comes with Forte. I took a college course with this book and it was very easy to understand and follow.

IDEs will usually do this for you. I use Eclipse, which is a totally free IDE based on code donated by IBM. Many commercial vendors have a “community” edition which they do not charge for and which will compile code for you. You will still need to set up your Java environment which may mean getting into some nitty gritty, but once this is done you can do all your compiling within windows.

Also, being a school you might want approach the vendors directly as they generally have education versions of their software at greatly reduced prices.

You can get Eclipse here: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/index.php

<edit>GlobalPN beat me with some good IDE suggestions...</edit>

Another decent IDE for school related projects is called BlueJ. It's a fairly lightweight Java IDE that we used in a class that I worked with last year. It's available at www.bluej.org.