Book Image

Introduction to JVM Languages

Book Image

Introduction to JVM Languages

Overview of this book

Anyone who knows software development knows about the Java Virtual Machine. The Java Virtual Machine is responsible for interpreting Java byte code and translating it into actions. In the beginning, Java was the only programming language used for the JVM. But increasing complexity of the language and the remarkable performance of the JVM created an opening for a new generation of programming languages. If you want to build a strong foundation with the Java Virtual Machine and get started with popular modern programming languages, then this book is for you. The book will begin with a general introduction of the JVM and its features, which are common to the JVM languages, helping you get abreast with its concepts. It will then dive into explaining languages such as Java, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, and Groovy and will show how to work with each language, their features, use cases, and pros and cons. By writing example projects in those languages and focusing on each language’s strong points, it will help you find the programming language that is most appropriate for your particular needs. By the end of the book, you will have written multiple programs that run on the Java Virtual Machine and know about the differences between the various languages.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we created a small GUI desktop application with a simple animated bouncing text. We started by installing the Kotlin plugin for the Eclipse IDE. We also installed Apache Maven, a very popular build tool for the JVM platform, that uses XML files for its build files. From the Kotlin's team GitHub page, we downloaded a starter kit that contained a Maven build file, that we used as a template for our own project. We imported the project in the Eclipse IDE and because of Eclipse's built-in Maven support, we did not have to configure anything. Eclipse automatically mapped its GUI actions to the correct Maven goals.

Finally, we were ready to write the desktop GUI application. We studied various JavaFX concepts and also learned a new Kotlin feature, extension functions, along the way. When we encountered a bug in the code, we used the debugger to find the cause and fix the problem.

In the next chapter, we will take a good look at Apache Groovy. Groovy, unlike Kotlin, is a...