Importing libraries

Question

Hey guys, I'm pretty new to Java and have a question about importing libraries into my code.
A quick rundown of my system:
Have a sphinx4 speech recognition engine which recognizes movement commands for a robot, such as move forward ten feet, or turn left thirty degrees.
My robot, coded in PBASIC is set to await data from a bluetooth serial port.
When sphinx4 recognizes a command, it sends a series of bytes to my robots microcontroller, via the serial port.
I am trying to use simpleserial(http://web.media.mit.edu/~benres/simpleserial/) to code my java to transmit bytes over the serial connection.
My question:
How do i properly install the *.java libraries of simpleserial in order to use them in my code. I have tried adding the *.java files to a home folder such as:
sphinx4\simpleserial\SimpleSerial.java
etc..
for each file
In my code, I tried using:
import simpleserial.SimpleSerial;
etc..
When I compile, it says that sphinx4\simpleserial\SimpleSerial.java does not contain the class path for simpleserial.SimpleSerial;
Any ideas?

Answer 1

rotary9k wrote:
The files that I need to include are SimpleSerial.java and SimpleSerialNative.java. The zip file that I downloaded contains the .class files for these, so that means they are already compiled right?Yes.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Put the jar file in your classpath", could you elaborate a bit more.First -- you downloaded a zip file? Not a .jar file? I believe that both use .zip compression, but a .jar file is the traditional way to distribute Java binaries (compiled classes).
The classpath is a value that tells the Java virtual machine and the compiler where to find classes to use. You can specify it as an environment variable, or as an argument to the java and javac programs (e.g., on a Windows machine, java.exe and javac.exe). In IDEs the classpath is more integrated and might not be described as "classpath".
Basically you just set the classpath to include the jar file, like this on a unix system:
export CLASSPATH=yourJarFile.jar:$CLASSPATHfor an environment variable, or on the command line like this:
javac -classpath=yourJarFile.jar TheClassYouWantToCompile.javaetc.
There are tutorials on this site that go into more detail.