Book Image

Modular Programming in Java 9

By : Koushik Srinivas Kothagal
Book Image

Modular Programming in Java 9

By: Koushik Srinivas Kothagal

Overview of this book

The Java 9 module system is an important addition to the language that affects the way we design, write, and organize code and libraries in Java. It provides a new way to achieve maintainable code by the encapsulation of Java types, as well as a way to write better libraries that have clear interfaces. Effectively using the module system requires an understanding of how modules work and what the best practices of creating modules are. This book will give you step-by-step instructions to create new modules as well as migrate code from earlier versions of Java to the Java 9 module system. You'll be working on a fully modular sample application and add features to it as you learn about Java modules. You'll learn how to create module definitions, setup inter-module dependencies, and use the built-in modules from the modular JDK. You will also learn about module resolution and how to use jlink to generate custom runtime images. We will end our journey by taking a look at the road ahead. You will learn some powerful best practices that will help you as you start building modular applications. You will also learn how to upgrade an existing Java 8 codebase to Java 9, handle issues with libraries, and how to test Java 9 applications.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 1. Introducing Java 9 Modularity

This book covers modularity features in Java 9--an important new change to the Java programming language. We'll look at its impact on Java development and how you can use it to build powerful modular applications. The Java 9 release also comes with a few other changes, such as support for HTTP 2.0 and a shell called jshell that lets you run Java code snippets in a Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL). While these are exciting new changes, they are not the focus of this book. We will be primarily focusing on the modularity features, which are arguably the most important and powerful among all the new changes with the Java 9 release.

This chapter provides an introduction to the new module features in Java 9 by covering the following topics:

  • Examining two important structural and organizational problems when building Java applications today, and their implications
  • Why does Java even need modularity features? What are we missing right now? And what do we gain from modularity?
  • Introducing the Java Platform Module System (JPMS)
  • Understanding the benefits that the Java modular system aims to provide