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

Java 9 modules


When writing an application in Java 9, you are ideally creating a modular application. It's important to note that a modular Java application isn't just a regular Java application (like those we've been building all these years) with just an extra module feature thrown in. It actually calls for a completely new way of thinking about writing and structuring your code base. Before we get into creating Java 9 modules, let's do a quick recap of the traditional Java code structure pre-Java 9.

Traditional Java code structure

Traditionally, writing a Java application starts with creating one or more source directories. These are special directories that serve two purposes--firstly, they act as root locations of your Java source code and secondly, the contents of these directories are added to the class path. So, the steps to organize source code have typically been:

  1. Create one or more source folders.
  2. In a source folder, create package folders to mirror the package name.
  3. Place the .java...