# Gild

# Introduction

Gild stands for "Groupware enabled Integrated Learning and Development". It is designed to support students and teachers in the process of learning and teaching the basic concepts of computer programming. This means that is designed to support communication between students and teachers. This also means that the Gild Project must include a simple, though robust, environment for software development.

There are already many robust integrated development environments (IDEs). So why is another one needed? Other IDEs can be difficult to use because they are designed for professional programmers. They do a lot more than what a novice programmer needs to do. Gild isn't simply another IDE, though the IDE is an important part of Gild. Gild's IDE is simple because it presents to the user only the tools that he or she will need in order to accomplish introductory programming tasks. But the Gild project is also robust because it is designed to be more than an IDE; it will help students learn how to program.

Gild is designed specifically to aid in learning how to program using the Java programming language. This document will deal with those features of Gild that students will need to become familiar with in order to start programming in Java using Gild. But before we dive into the details of Gild, students may need to be familiarized a little bit with the environment in which Gild was developed: Eclipse.

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