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

Summary


This chapter examined the part of the application development process after you are done writing code--building and packaging your application for distribution. We started the chapter by examining the module resolution process. We then looked at the process of linking, which uses module resolution to build a runtime image containing just the modules needed for a given application. We then looked at some of the built-in plugins that allow us to optimize and preprocess the generated image. Finally, we learned how to generate a modular JAR file to bundle reusable library modules for use in other applications.

We've looked at a lot of features so far and how they work. In the next chapter, we'll start looking at how to work with Java 9 modules in the context of an existing legacy Java codebase. You'll learn ways to write code that is interoperable between different Java versions. You'll also learn techniques and strategies to migrate existing code written using Java 8 or earlier to the...