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

Chapter 3. Java

While exploring the JVM and JDK concepts in the previous chapters, we looked at quite a bit of Java code. Source code written in Java is generally easy to read and comprehend. It started out as a relatively simple language to learn. As more and more features were added to the language over the years, its complexity increased somewhat. However, good news is that beginners don't have to worry about the more advanced topics too much until they are ready to learn them.

Programmers that want to choose a JVM language other than Java can still benefit from this chapter, especially once they start using libraries or frameworks that provide Javadocs as API documentation. As we will see soon, Javadoc is a tool provided with the JDK that generates HTML documentation based on some special comments in the source code. Many libraries and frameworks provide the HTML documents generated by Javadocs as part of their documentation.

These are the topics we will discuss in this chapter:

  • Object...