"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." -- William Edwards Deming (American Quality Control Expert, 1900-1993)

I'm always rather hesitant to make a change in my IDE (Interactive Development Environment). I get familiar with the way things work and I'm usually quite attached to my productivity using the tools to which I have become accustomed.

I kept using Visual Age for Java long after IBM changed it focus to the Eclipse-based Studio platform, and I've been using WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.0 for a long time now, even though 5.1, and then later, 5.1.1 have been available to me for quite some time.

But when I read about the support for J2EE 1.4 and Java Server Faces 1.0 that was coming with version 5.1.2 (at http://www-306.ibm.com/software/swnews/swnews.nsf/n/pmcs5ygp2y), I decided that it was finally time to bite the bullet and make a switch.

Preparing to install
For a variety of reasons, I have both a Windows development box and a Linux development box. For no particular reason, I decided to start with the Windows box first, although 5.1.2, like all other versions of Studio, is available for both, and eventually I will make the change in both.

By default, version 5.1.2 installs into a slightly different directory than earlier versions, so you can install 5.1.2 right next to an existing 5.0, 5.1, or 5.1.1 installation. Being a "belt and suspenders" kind of man myself, I decided to keep my trusty 5.0 implementation intact until well after I determined that all was well with the new version. With a little (OK, quite a bit!) of long overdue housecleaning, there was plenty of room on my hard drive for both versions to live, so I downloaded the product, extracted and assembled the install images and sat down to step through the process.

Launching the installation
I started out by opening up the disk1 folder in the \IBMWSAppDev-5.1.2\ installation-images root directory. The contents of the disk1 folder are displayed in Figure A.

FIGURE A

The disk1 folder contains the contents of installation disk 1. Click picture for a larger image.

Double clicking on the launchpad.exe icon in the disk1 folder brought up the Launch Pad screen, shown in Figure B, which it turns out is somewhat of wasted step, since selecting the "Install WebSphere Studio Application Developer" option on the Launch Pad screen does exactly the same thing as if I had just opened up the "setup" folder on disk1 and clicked on setup.exe.

FIGURE B

One way to initiate the installation is to use the Launch Pad. Click picture for a larger image.

Either way, you end on the first panel of the WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.1.2 Installer, shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C

This is the starting point for the Installation Wizard. Click picture for a larger image.