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

Java Class Library


The Java Class Library is also simply known as the Java API. It's a huge collection of prebuilt classes that is distributed with the Java SE platform. Some of the more important themes of the library include:

  • Definitions and implementations of common data structures
  • Console I/O
  • File I/O
  • Mathematics
  • Networking
  • Regular expressions
  • XML creation and processing
  • Database access
  • GUI toolkits
  • Reflection

We cannot cover the complete Java Class Library here, but we want to give some examples of the APIs that are available and give you pointers on where to find the classes you need. Before we look at specific classes, we will take a look at the main organization. We'll cover the following topics:

  • Java Class Library organization
  • Package overview
  • Fundamental classes from the java.lang package
  • Collections API, namely java.util.ArrayList and java.util.HashMap

Java Class Library organization

All the classes of the library are put in packages. The most important package names start with either:

  • java
  • javax...