RxJava - Environment Setup

This chapter will guide you on how to prepare a development environment to start your work with RxJava. It will also teach you how to set up JDK on your machine before you set up RxJava −

Setup Java Development Kit (JDK)

You can download the latest version of SDK from Oracle's Java site − Java SE Downloads. You will find instructions for installing JDK in downloaded files, follow the given instructions to install and configure the setup. Finally set PATH and JAVA_HOME environment variables to refer to the directory that contains java and javac, typically java_install_dir/bin and java_install_dir respectively.

If you are running Windows and have installed the JDK in C:\jdk-24, you would have to put the following line in your C:\autoexec.bat file.

set PATH=C:\jdk-24;%PATH% 
set JAVA_HOME=C:\jdk-24

Alternatively, on Windows NT/2000/XP, you will have to right-click on My Computer, select Properties → Advanced → Environment Variables. Then, you will have to update the PATH value and click the OK button.

On Unix (Solaris, Linux, etc.), if the SDK is installed in /usr/local/jdk-24 and you use the C shell, you will have to put the following into your .cshrc file.

setenv PATH /usr/local/jdk-24/bin:$PATH 
setenv JAVA_HOME /usr/local/jdk-24

Alternatively, if you use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Borland JBuilder, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, or Sun ONE Studio, you will have to compile and run a simple program to confirm that the IDE knows where you have installed Java. Otherwise, you will have to carry out a proper setup as given in the document of the IDE.

Popular Java Editors

To write your Java programs, you need a text editor. There are many sophisticated IDEs available in the market. But for now, you can consider one of the following −

• Notepad − On Windows machine, you can use any simple text editor like Notepad (Recommended for this tutorial), TextPad.

• Netbeans − It is a Java IDE that is open-source and free, which can be downloaded from www.netbeans.org/index.html.

• Eclipse − It is also a Java IDE developed by the eclipse open-source community and can be downloaded from www.eclipse.org.

Download RxJava Archive

Download the latest version of RxJava jar files. At the time of writing this tutorial, we have downloaded rxjava-3.1.11.jar and reactive-streams-1.0.4.jar, and copied it into C:\>RxJava folder.

• RxJava @ MVN Repository

• Reactive Streams @MVN Repository

Set RxJava Environment

Set the RxJava environment variable to point to the base directory location where rxjava jar is stored on your machine. Let's assuming we've stored rxjava-3.1.11.jar in the RxJava folder.

Set CLASSPATH Variable

Set the CLASSPATH environment variable to point to the rxjava jar location.