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

Migrating libraries


We've looked at steps and strategies to follow when migrating applications to the Java modules. How about libraries? Let's say you are the maintainer of an open source library that is used by many people. Or, perhaps, you maintain a library that's used by multiple teams in your organization. How would you migrate such a code base? Wouldn't that require you to follow the same steps we've covered to migrate applications? Well, mostly yes. However, there are certain things you need to do differently with libraries. This section covers those details.

What's perhaps the biggest difference with libraries is that you no longer work in the context of an application. A library could be used by multiple applications. These applications could be using multiple versions of Java. How could you create a single library JAR that could work for all those cases? Thankfully, there are some features in the platform that make this easier.

Before we get into those specific problems, let's look...