Book Image

Introduction to JVM Languages

By : van der Leun
Book Image

Introduction to JVM Languages

By: van der Leun

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 (15 chapters)

JRuby (Ruby)

Ruby is a popular dynamic object-oriented programming language that powers a lot of web applications, thanks to the popularity of the Ruby-on-Rails framework. Like Python, Ruby's reference implementation is interpreter-based and is written using the C language. Ruby is much more object-oriented than Python, though, and the syntax of both the languages differs a lot. While (almost) everything is public in Python, Ruby supports access modifiers such as private and protected, similar to Java.

JRuby is the JVM-based implementation of Ruby. While Ruby's main implementation, called MRI (Maz's Ruby Interpreter, named after Ruby designer Yukihiro Matsumoto), is actively developed, most alternative Ruby implementations have been abandoned at this point. JRuby is one of the few alternative Ruby implementations that is still actively developed. JRuby takes full...