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 7. Introducing Services

In this chapter, we'll learn about yet another exciting new feature in Java modularity called services. Services offer an additional layer of indirection between modules when compared to direct dependencies, and we will see that they add extra flexibility to how we can get modules to work with each other. In this chapter, you will:

  • Understand one of the limitations of module dependencies the way we have been doing things so far
  • Understand what services are and how they solve this problem
  • Learn how to create and expose services
  • Learn how to consume services using the ServiceLoader API

Before we learn what services are, let's examine and understand the actual problem that they were created to solve. It's the problem of tight coupling between modules with direct dependencies, at least the way we've been hooking them up so far.