It is common to have more than one Java run time installed on a system. If your default Java run time is an older version, but you know the path to a more recent version (1.4 or later), you can set the XML_COMMON_JAVA environment variable to this location. In addition, you can also include proxy settings if your local system can not directly access the Internet. For example, on the system I use in Arizona, I set this environment variable as shown below, and then test it by running a test Java application I have that retrieves information from the Internet:

[pkb@salsa common] export XML_COMMON_JAVA="/liz3/pkb/usr/j2re1.4.2_03/bin/java \
-DproxyHost=172.26.0.232 -DproxyPort=3128"
[pkb@salsa common] $XML_COMMON_JAVA -cp ~pkb/java com.ccg.net.URLCat \
-url http://www.networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/cgi-bin/ip.cgi
read:0  bytes
192.101.77.176
[pkb@salsa common] 

Paul has found the DocBook.org tools to be an invaluable asset when creating software documentation (including man pages). The DocBook.org tools are freely available, and basic text and HTML output can be had for the price of time in configuring your Java environment. In order for you the developer the experience the sheer joy and frustration of working with DocBook.org style files, you will want to install the docbook-xsl package locally on your system. This package provides the XSL files necessary to translate the XML DocBook.org files into things like HTML and man pages. By default, we assume that you don't have a local copy installed and use http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current as the anchor point. If you did take the time to install a local copy on your system (to speed up the build process), you should set the XML_COMMON_DOCBOOK environment variable to point the directory such that html/chunk.xsl is found. For example:

[pkb@salsa common] export XML_COMMON_DOCBOOK="/usr/share/sgml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets"
[pkb@salsa common] if [ -f "$XML_COMMON_DOCBOOK/html/chunk.xsl" ]; then echo "OK"; fi
[pkb@salsa common]