Cygwin and Java

Cygwin is a UNIX-like environment which runs on top of Windows. It comes with a number of UNIX tools (for example, grep and sed) and the bash shell.

Cygwin is implemented as a Windows DLL which provides an API very similar to the UNIX API. Using Cygwin, programs written for compilation under UNIX can often be cross-compiled for Win32 with minimal changes.

Cygwin provides an excellent development platform in conjunction with Java. Both are free downloads; Cygwin provides the UNIX tool suite for shell scripting, while Java provides an object-oriented development language and platform.

We haven't found many resources about using Java and Cygwin together, so we've attempted to provide some. See the list of articles at left; you might start with the FAQ.

If you have information to add, questions to ask, or (gasp) mistakes to correct, let us know!