Chapter 2: Why You Should Learn Programming With Java

In the early 90s, Sun Microsystems developed and released the Java programming language. It is a general-purpose and high-level language that can run on various operating systems, like Windows, Mac OS, and UNIX platforms. This post gives an overview of the language and its features.

Why Should You Learn Programming With Java?

Java is one of the essential tools big businesses use to develop applications because of its reliability and support for backward compatibility. Besides that, and from a technical point of view, here are other things we should consider learning to program with Java.

Object-Oriented Programming Paradigm. Programming with Java means using the Object-oriented programing paradigm wherein we deal with classes and objects.
Java can run in various Operating systems. When we write Java codes, those codes can run in different operating systems without any changes. This is because Java allows us to compile Java codes into platform-independent codes that run on a JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Therefore, as long as a machine has a JVM installed for whatever operating systems, we can always run the same codes.
Codes are simple. Writing codes in Java is simple. The codes’ syntaxes are easy to read and uses simple keywords.
Secure as in safe. Java is secure because it runs within a JVM.
Architecture-neutral. Java is neural in terms of the architecture style we would want to use.
Java applications are portable. With the same source code files, we can compile and run them in many operating systems. The same goes for byte codes – we can run them on any platform with the appropriate JVM.
Robustness is the game. Java handles errors elegantly and has an excellent memory management capability. Also, it does not use pointers in some other programming languages.

Hello World using Java Programming

Check this sample “Hello World” Java program that prints out the sentence “Hello World.”

package com.example.producingwebservice;

public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello world");
    }
}

package com.example.producingwebservice;

public class HelloWorld {

public static void main(String[] args) {

System.out.println("Hello world");

}

Easy right? Here’s an activity that you can try out.

Chapter 3: How To Write Your First Java Program

Strengths of Java Language

The version of Java is Java 16. Oracle released it on March 16, 2021. Note that Java is both a language and a platform, and you will read terms like Java Core and Java EE. These are still Java, but one latter sits atop the first. So, what are some strengths of Java?

It can run multiple threads within a program.
It is compiled but interpreted. We build a Java application; we compile our codes into bytecodes. Then, we run these byte codes within a JVM.
It uses Just-In-Time compilation (JIT). Since we deal with classes and objects, Java can compile and load only that file whenever we change a class.
Java is distributed. Java is distributed because of its RMI and EJB. However, not many modern Java applications use them directly.
Dynamic. Java is dynamic because we can manipulate an application’s byte codes at run-time.