The binary release includes only the binary compiled ‘.class’
versions of the same ‘.java’ source files in the source release.
It does not include any documentation, so you probably want the
source release in addition to the binary release. The purpose
of the binary release is just to save you time and trouble of
compiling the sources.
The binary release depends on certain "Java 2" features correspondiong to JDK 1.4. If you have an older Java implementation (including JDK 1.1.x) you will need to get the source distribution.
The binary release comes as a .jar archive
‘kawa-1.8.jar’.
Copy this archive to some suitable location,
such as /usr/local/lib/kawa.jar.
Then, before you can actually run Kawa, you need to set CLASSPATH
so it includes the Kawa archive. On Unix, using a Bourne-style shell:
CLASSPATH=/usr/local/lib/kawa.jar export CLASSPATH
On Windows you need to set classpath in a DOS console.
For example:
set classpath=\kawa\kawa-1.8.jar
Then to run Kawa do:
java kawa.repl
To run Kawa in a fresh window, you can do:
java kawa.repl -w