You will hear and see quite a few Java buzzwords in the Java world. It’s important to know the Java buzzwords because they represent the factors that have played important roles in shaping the Java language. These words are summarized in Table 1-3.
Buzzword |
Description |
| Architecture neutral | The Java compiler compiles the source code into bytecode, whichdoes not depend upon any machine architecture, but can be easilytranslated into a specific machine by a JVM for that machine. |
| Distributed | Java offers extensive support for the distributed environment of theInternet. |
| Dynamic | New code can be added to the libraries without affecting theapplications that are using the libraries, runtime type informationcan be found easily, and so on. |
| High performance | The Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers improve the performance ofinterpreting the bytecode by caching the interpretations. |
| Interpreted | The Java compiler compiles the source code into bytecode, whichcan be executed on any machine by the Java interpreter of anappropriate JVM. |
| Multithreaded | Java provides support for multithreaded programming. |
| Object oriented | Java supports the features and philosophy of object-orientedprogramming. |
| Portable | There are no implementation-dependent aspects of the languagespecifications. For example, the sizes of primitive data types and thebehavior of the arithmetic on them are specified. This contributes tomaking programs portable among different platforms such asWindows, Mac, and Unix. |
| Robust | Java provides support for error checking at various stages: earlychecking at compile time, and dynamic checking at runtime. Thiseliminates some situations that are error prone such as pointers inthe C language. |
| Secure | Because Java supports the distributed environment of the Internet,it also offers multiple security features. |
| Simple | Java omits many clumsy and confusing features of otherprogramming languages such as C++. Also, Java is designed to beable to run stand-alone on small machines. The size of the basicinterpreter and class support is 40 KB. |
The most popular buzzwords are architecture neutral (or platform independent), object oriented, and portable.
The three most important takeaways from this chapter are the following:
- You write a computer program in a high-level language and use the compiler to convert it into an executable program that will actually be executed by the computer.
- Following the underlying philosophy of object-oriented programming, Java allows you to adapt computing to the problem that you are trying to solve by directly representing the objects in the problem with objects in the Java program. The objects are created from classes that you write.
- The Java compiler creates bytecode that can be translated by a Java virtual machine (JVM) for a specific platform, such as Windows, Solaris, or Mac, into executable instructions. So, a Java program written once can be run on different platforms by using different JVMs.
1 comment
anu says:
July 26, 2010 at 6:58 am (UTC 5)
very nice description