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

Apache Ivy and IvyDE


Unlike the other languages we have covered so far, we are not going to use a separate build tool to build the project. We'll be using Eclipse IDE's built-in build capabilities, which internally are based on Apache Ant. Ant was the first popular build tool that was dedicated to the JVM. During the course of the project, we will let Eclipse IDE take care of the build process.

Note

Groovy is well-supported by many popular (and even some other, less popular) JVM-based build tools. If you need more control than the build process of your IDE provides, Gradle and Maven are both very good choices for building your Groovy-based projects.

To build the web-service example that accesses a database, we need several external dependencies:

  • The Vert.x framework to build microservices
  • A local Database management system (DBMS), including the JDBC driver

We could download the needed files from various sites, install them in the correct directory, and manually adjust the JVM class path, but this...