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


I hope that we have debunked the perception that writing a web application in Java always requires much more code than other modern languages. While writing the code, we used various Eclipse IDE features to ease and speed up development. Gradle was used to manage dependencies and build the project. and we added Gradle's application plugin so that we could easily run our application by running a simple Gradle task. By applying TDD, we wrote a backend class. The Jackson library was used to convert this class's output to JSON, and the SparkJava framework was used to create the web service around that.

If you are interested in the SparkJava framework, then be sure to visit http://sparkjava.com.

In the next chapter, we will look at Scala. This language has strong support for functional programming, but it is a pure OOP language at the same time.