and another thing you need to know ... even if you were to compile that code correctly .... javaw.exe will not run it .... what you are writing is a console application ..... javaw was built only for GUI applications ..... java.exe is what you should be using in this case ..... javaw was put there to get wid of the console , while running a gui app ..... since in most cases the console is mainly used as a debugging feature .... or just to give screen dumps when checking the state of the program .... javaw.exe will just ignore the print statements you have there without giving any errors .... and for IDE 's i rate JCreator as the one to get