| Java (programming Language) |
Article Index for Java |
Website Links For Java |
Information AboutJava (programming Language) |
Java is a Programming Language whose programs are easily portable to any Computer , which reduces the cost of producing programs and has made Java the most widely used programming language on SourceForge. The language derives much of its Syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler Object Model and fewer low-level facilities. JavaScript , a Scripting Language , shares a similar name and has similar syntax, but is not directly related to Java. The original and Reference Implementation Java Compiler s, Virtual Machine s, and Class Libraries were developed by Sun from 1995. As of May 2007, in compliance with the specifications of the Java Community Process , Sun made available most of their Java technologies as Free Software under the GNU General Public License . Others have also developed alternative implementations of these Sun technologies, such as the GNU Compiler For Java and GNU Classpath . IMPORTANCE Java has become the most widely used programming language because it is not necessary to write a different version for each combination of an Operating System with a Cpu . Each cpu requires a unique native machine code. In addition the Operating System also has specific and unique commands it responds to. Usually the Source Code for a Computer Program will be used as input to a Compiler which will produce Machine Code specific to one combination of an operating system and a cpu. For each such combination, the program must be run through another compiler. Compilers are expensive and difficult to produce. Java is typically compiled to Bytecode . Each computer converts the bytecode into native Machine Code at the time the program runs. Writing a program to do this conversion is simpler and less costly than creating a compiler. Today there is such a Run Time Environment for virtually every operating system and cpu combination. Thus today almost any computer can run every Java program. Originally developed by Sun Microsystems and released in 1995. Java applications are typically Compiled to Bytecode , although compilation to native Machine Code is also possible. At Runtime , bytecode is usually either Interpreted or compiled to native code for execution, although direct Hardware execution of bytecode by a Java Processor is also possible. HISTORY , the Java Mascot . Click here to see a 3D interactive Duke made with Java ]] The Java language was created by , 2007 .. The first public implementation was Java 1.0 in 1995. It promised " Write Once, Run Anywhere " (WORA), providing no-cost runtimes on popular platforms. It was fairly secure and its security was configurable, allowing network and file access to be restricted. Major web browsers soon incorporated the ability to run secure Java '' Applet s'' within web pages. Java became popular quickly. With the advent of ''Java 2'', new versions had multiple configurations built for different types of platforms. For example, '' J2EE '' was for enterprise applications and the greatly stripped down version '' J2ME '' was for mobile applications. '' J2SE '' was the designation for the Standard Edition. In 2006, for marketing purposes, new ''J2'' versions were renamed ''Java EE'', ''Java ME'', and ''Java SE'', respectively. In 1997, Sun Microsystems approached the , proprietary software. Sun's revenue from Java was generated by the selling of licenses for specialized products such as the Java Enterprise System. Sun distinguishes between its Software Development Kit (SDK) and Runtime Environment (JRE) which is a subset of the SDK, the primary distinction being that in the JRE, the compiler, utility programs, and many necessary header files are not present. On 13 November 2006 , Sun released much of Java as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). On 8 May 2007 Sun finished the process, making all of Java's core code Open Source , aside from a small portion of code to which Sun did not hold the copyright.http://open.itworld.com/4915/070508opsjava/page_1.html Releases See Also: Java version history The Java project has seen many release versions. Since 1995 they are:
PHILOSOPHY Primary goals There were five primary goals in the creation of the Java language: # It should use the Object-oriented Programming methodology. # It should allow the same program to be Executed on multiple Operating System s. # It should contain built-in support for using Computer Network s. # It should be designed to execute code from Remote Source s securely. # It should be easy to use by selecting what were considered the good parts of other object-oriented languages. Platform independence See Also: Java Platform One characteristic, Platform Independence , means that Program s written in the Java language must run similarly on any supported hardware/operating-system platform. One should be able to write a program once, compile it once, and run it anywhere. This is achieved by most Java Compiler s by compiling the Java language code ''halfway'' (to Java Bytecode ) – simplified machine instructions specific to the Java platform. The code is then run on a Virtual Machine (VM), a program written in native code on the host hardware that Interprets and executes generic Java bytecode. (In some JVM versions, bytecode can also be compiled to native code, resulting in faster execution.) Further, standardized libraries are provided to allow access to features of the host machines (such as graphics, Threading and Networking ) in unified ways. Note that, although there is an explicit compiling stage, at some point, the Java bytecode is interpreted or converted to native Machine Code by the JIT Compiler . The first implementations of the language used an interpreted virtual machine to achieve Portability . These implementations produced programs that ran more slowly than programs compiled to native executables, for instance written in C or C++, so the language suffered a reputation for poor performance. More recent JVM implementations produce programs that run significantly faster than before, using multiple techniques. The first technique is to simply compile directly into native code like a more traditional compiler. There are implementations of Java compilers that translate the Java language code to native Object Code , such as GCJ , removing the intermediate bytecode stage. This achieves good performance, but at the expense of portability; the output of these compilers can only be run on a single Architecture . Another technique, known as ''just-in-time compilation'' (JIT), translates the Java bytecodes into native code at the time that the program is run which results in a program that executes faster than interpreted code but also incurs compilation overhead during execution. More sophisticated VMs use '' Dynamic Recompilation '', in which the VM can analyze the behavior of the running program and selectively recompile and optimize critical parts of the program. Dynamic recompilation can achieve optimizations superior to static compilation because the dynamic compiler can base optimizations on knowledge about the runtime environment and the set of loaded classes, and can identify the ''hot spots'' (parts of the program, often inner loops, that take up most of execution time). JIT compilation and dynamic recompilation allow Java programs to take advantage of the speed of native code without losing portability. Implementations Sun Microsystems officially licenses the Java Standard Edition platform for Microsoft Windows , Linux , and Solaris . Through a network of third-party vendors and licensees,http://java.sun.com/javase/licensees.jsp alternative Java environments are available for these and other platforms. To qualify as a certified Java licensee, an implementation on any particular platform must pass a rigorous suite of validation and compatibility tests. This method enables a guaranteed level of compliance and platform through a trusted set of commercial and non-commercial partners. Sun's trademark license for usage of the Java brand insists that all implementations be "compatible". This resulted in a legal dispute with Microsoft after Sun claimed that the Microsoft implementation did not support the RMI and JNI interfaces and had added platform-specific features of their own. Sun sued and won both damages in 1997 (some $20 million) and a court order enforcing the terms of the license from Sun. As a result, Microsoft no longer ships Java with Windows , and in recent versions of Windows, Internet Explorer cannot support Java applets without a third-party plugin. However, Sun and others have made available Java run-time systems at no cost for those and other versions of Windows. Platform-independent Java is essential to the Java Enterprise Edition strategy, and an even more rigorous validation is required to certify an implementation. This environment enables portable server-side applications, such as Web Service s, Servlet s, and Enterprise JavaBean s, as well as with Embedded System s based on OSGi , using Embedded Java environments. Through the new GlassFish project, Sun is working to create a fully functional, unified Open-source implementation of the Java EE technologies. Automatic memory management See Also: Garbage collection (computer science) One of the ideas behind Java's automatic memory management model is that programmers be spared the burden of having to perform manual memory management. In some languages the programmer allocates memory for the creation of objects stored on the heap and the responsibility of later deallocating that memory also resides with the programmer. If the programmer forgets to deallocate memory or writes code that fails to do so, a Memory Leak occurs and the program can consume an arbitrarily large amount of memory. Additionally, if the program attempts to deallocate the region of memory more than once, the result is undefined and the program may become unstable and may crash. Finally, in non garbage collected environments, there is a certain degree of overhead and complexity of user-code to track and finalize allocations. Often developers may box themselves into certain designs to provide reasonable assurances that memory leaks will not occur.http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#memory-leaks In Java, this potential problem is avoided by Automatic Garbage Collection . The programmer determines when objects are created, and the Java runtime is responsible for managing the Object's Lifecycle . The program or other objects can reference an object by holding a reference to it (which, from a low-level point of view, is its address on the heap). When no references to an object remain, the Java garbage collector automatically deletes the Unreachable Object , freeing memory and preventing a memory leak. Memory leaks may still occur if a programmer's code holds a reference to an object that is no longer needed—in other words, they can still occur but at higher conceptual levels. The use of garbage collection in a language can also affect programming paradigms. If, for example, the developer assumes that the cost of memory allocation/recollection is low, they may choose to more freely construct objects instead of pre-initializing, holding and reusing them. With the small cost of potential performance penalties (inner-loop construction of large/complex objects), this facilitates thread-isolation (no need to synchronize as different threads work on different object instances) and data-hiding. The use of transient immutable value-objects minimizes side-effect programming. Comparing Java and C++ , it is possible in C++ to implement similar functionality (for example, a memory management model for specific classes can be designed in C++ to improve speed and lower memory fragmentation considerably), with the possible cost of adding comparable runtime overhead to that of Java's garbage collector, and of added development time and application complexity if one favors manual implementation over using an existing third-party library. In Java, garbage collection is built-in and virtually invisible to the developer. That is, developers may have no notion of when garbage collection will take place as it may not necessarily correlate with any actions being explicitly performed by the code they write. Depending on intended application, this can be beneficial or disadvantageous: the programmer is freed from performing low-level tasks, but at the same time loses the option of writing lower level code. Java does not support Pointer Arithmetic as is supported in for example C++. This is because the garbage collector may relocate referenced objects, invalidating such pointers. Another reason that Java forbids this is that type safety and security can no longer be guaranteed if arbitrary manipulation of pointers is allowed. SYNTAX See Also: Java syntax The syntax of Java is largely derived from C++ . However, unlike C++, which combines the syntax for structured, generic, and object-oriented programming, Java was built exclusively as an object oriented language. As a result, almost everything is an object and all code is written inside a class. The exceptions are the intrinsic data types (ordinal and real numbers, boolean values, and characters), which are not classes for performance reasons. This is a minimal Hello World Program in Java: // Hello.java public class Hello { public static void main(String {Link without Title} args) { System.out.println("Hello, World!"); } } To execute a Java program, the code is saved as a file named Hello.java. It must first be compiled into bytecode using a Java Compiler , which produces a file named Hello.class. This class is then ''launched''.The above example merits a bit of explanation.
An example that better demonstrates Object-oriented Programming : // OddEven.java import javax.swing.JOptionPane; public class OddEven { private int input; public OddEven() { input = Integer.parseInt(JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Please Enter A Number")); } public void calculate() { if (input % 2 == 0) System.out.println("Even"); else System.out.println("Odd"); } public static void main(String {Link without Title} args) { OddEven number = new OddEven(); number.calculate(); } }
Applet See Also: Java applet Java applets are programs that are embedded in other applications, typically in a Web page displayed in a Web Browser . // Hello.java import java.applet.Applet; import java.awt.Graphics; public class Hello extends Applet { public void paint(Graphics gc) { gc.drawString("Hello, world!", 65, 95); } } The import statements direct the Java Compiler to include the '''''' and '''''' classes in the compilation. The import statement allows these classes to be referenced in the Source Code using the ''simple class name'' (i.e. Applet) instead of the ''fully qualified class name'' (i.e. java.applet.Applet).The Hello class extends ( Subclasses ) the '''Applet''' class; the Applet class provides the framework for the host application to display and control the Lifecycle of the applet. The Applet class is an Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) , which provides the applet with the capability to display a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and respond to user Events .The Hello class Overrides the method inherited from the Superclass to provide the code to display the applet. The paint() method is passed a '''Graphics''' object that contains the graphic context used to display the applet. The paint() method calls the graphic context method to display the '''"Hello, world!"''' string at a Pixel offset of ('''65, 95''') from the upper-left corner in the applet's display.An applet is placed in an HTML document using the applet tag has three attributes set: '''code="Hello"''' specifies the name of the Applet class and '''width="200" height="200"''' sets the pixel width and height of the applet. Applets may also be embedded in HTML using either the object or embed element,http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/deployment/applet/applettag.html although support for these elements by Web browsers is inconsistent.http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/deployment/applet/mixedbrowser.html However, the applet tag is deprecated, so the object tag is preferred where supported.The host application, typically a Web browser, instantiates the Hello applet and creates an for the applet. Once the applet has initialized itself, it is added to the AWT display hierarchy. The paint method is called by the AWT Event Dispatching Thread whenever the display needs the applet to draw itself.Servlet See Also: Java Servlet Java Servlet technology provides Web developers with a simple, consistent mechanism for extending the functionality of a Web server and for accessing existing business systems. Servlets are Server-side Java EE components that generate responses (typically HTML pages) to requests (typically HTTP requests) from Client s. A servlet can almost be thought of as an applet that runs on the server side—without a face. // Hello.java
public class Hello extends GenericServlet { public void service(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException { response.setContentType("text/html"); final PrintWriter pw = response.getWriter(); pw.println("Hello, world!"); pw.close(); } } The import statements direct the Java compiler to include all of the public classes and Interfaces from the '''''' and '''''' Packages in the compilation.The Hello class '''extends''' the '''''' class; the GenericServlet class provides the interface for the Server to forward requests to the servlet and control the servlet's lifecycle.The Hello class overrides the method defined by the Interface to provide the code for the service request handler. The service() method is passed a object that contains the request from the client and a object used to create the response returned to the client. The service() method declares that it '''throws''' the Exceptions and if a problem prevents it from responding to the request.The method in the response object is called to set the MIME content type of the returned data to '''"text/html"'''. The method in the response returns a object that is used to write the data that is sent to the client. The method is called to write the '''"Hello, world!"''' string to the response and then the method is called to close the print writer, which causes the data that has been written to the stream to be returned to the client. JavaServer Page See Also: JavaServer Pages JavaServer Pages (JSPs) are Server-side Java EE components that generate responses, typically HTML pages, to HTTP requests from Client s. JSPs embed Java code in an HTML page by using the special Delimiter s <% and %>. A JSP is compiled to a Java ''servlet'', a Java application in its own right, the first time it is accessed. After that, the generated servlet creates the response.Swing application See Also: Swing (Java) Swing is a graphical user interface Library for the Java SE platform. This example Swing application creates a single window with "Hello, world!" inside: // Hello.java (Java SE 5) import java.awt.BorderLayout;
public class Hello extends JFrame { public Hello() { super("hello"); setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); getContentPane().setLayout(new BorderLayout()); getContentPane().add(new JLabel("Hello, world!")); pack(); } public static void main(String {Link without Title} args) { new Hello().setVisible(true); } } The first import statement directs the Java compiler to include the class from the package in the compilation; the second import includes all of the public classes and interfaces from the '''''' package.The Hello class '''extends''' the '''''' class; the JFrame class implements a Window with a Title Bar and a close Control .The Hello() Constructor initializes the frame by first calling the superclass constructor, passing the parameter "hello", which is used as the window's title. It then calls the '''''' method inherited from JFrame to set the default operation when the close control on the title bar is selected to '''''' — this causes the JFrame to be disposed of when the frame is closed (as opposed to merely hidden), which allows the JVM to exit and the program to terminate. Next, the layout of the frame is set to a BorderLayout; this tells Swing how to arrange the components that will be added to the frame. A '''''' is created for the string '''"Hello, world!"''' and the '''''' method inherited from the superclass is called to add the label to the frame. The '''''' method inherited from the superclass is called to size the window and Lay Out its contents, in the manner indicated by the BorderLayout.The main() method is called by the JVM when the program starts. It Instantiates a new '''Hello''' frame and causes it to be displayed by calling the '''''' method inherited from the superclass with the boolean parameter '''true'''. Note that once the frame is displayed, exiting the main method does not cause the program to terminate because the AWT Event Dispatching Thread remains active until all of the Swing top-level windows have been disposed.CRITICISM Performance Java's performance has increased substantially since the early versions, and performance of [http://www.kano.net/javabench/ The Java is Faster than C++ and C++ Sucks Unbiased Benchmark] FreeTTS - A Performance Case Study , Willie Walker, Paul Lamere, Philip Kwok The performance of the compilers does not necessarily indicate the performance of the compiled code; only careful testing can reveal the true performance issues in any system. In a paper written in 1999 by Lutz Prechelt it is outlined that, statistically, programmer efficiency and experience has a bearing many standard deviations greater on run-time and memory usage than language choice. This paper specifically uses Java as a basis for the comparison, due to its then bad reputation.Lutz Prechelt. Technical opinion: comparing Java vs. C/C++ efficiency differences to interpersonal differences. Communications Of The ACM , Vol 42, #10, 1999 Look and feel The default Look And Feel of GUI applications written in Java using the Swing toolkit is very different from native applications. It is possible to specify a different look and feel through the Pluggable Look And Feel system of Swing. Clones of Windows , GTK and Motif are supplied by Sun. Apple also provides an Aqua look and feel for Mac OS X . Though prior implementations of these look and feels have been considered lacking, Swing in Java SE 6 addresses this problem by using more native Widget drawing routines of the underlying platforms. Alternatively, third party toolkits such as Wx4j or SWT may be used for increased integration with the native windowing system. Object orientation caveat As in C++ and some other object-oriented languages, variables of Java's Primitive Type s are not objects. Primitive types store their values in the Stack rather than being references to values. This was a conscious decision by Java's designers for performance reasons. Because of this, Java is not considered to be a pure object-oriented programming language. However, as of Java 5.0, Autoboxing enables programmers to write as if primitive types are their wrapper classes, with their object-oriented counterparts representing classes of their own, and freely interchange between them for improved flexibility. Lack of features Unlike C++, Java suppresses several features (such as Operator Overloading and Multiple Inheritance ), in order to simplify the language, and to "save the programmers from themselves", to prevent possible errors and anti-pattern design. This has been a source of criticism, relating to a lack of low-level features, though most of these may be worked around (though not completely). RESOURCES Java Runtime Environment See Also: Java Runtime Environment The Java Runtime Environment, or ''JRE'', is the software required to run any Application deployed on the Java Platform. End-user s commonly use a JRE in Software Package s and Web browser Plugin s. Sun also distributes a superset of the JRE called the Java 2 SDK (more commonly known as the JDK), which includes development tools such as the Java Compiler , Javadoc , Jar and Debugger . One of the unique advantages of the concept of a runtime engine is that errors (exceptions) should not 'crash' the system. Moreover, in runtime engine environments such as Java there exist tools that attach to the runtime engine and every time that an exception of interest occurs they record debugging information that existed in memory at the time the exception was thrown (stack and heap values). These Automated Exception Handling tools provide 'root-cause' information for exceptions in Java programs that run in production, testing or development environments. Components
APIs See Also: Free Java implementations#Class library Sun has defined three platforms targeting different application environments and segmented many of its API s so that they belong to one of the platforms. The platforms are:
The Classes in the Java APIs are organized into separate groups called Packages . Each package contains a set of related Interface s, classes and Exceptions . Refer to the separate platforms for a description of the packages available. The set of APIs is controlled by Sun Microsystems in cooperation with others through the Java Community Process program. Companies or individuals participating in this process can influence the design and development of the APIs. This process has been a subject of controversy. IDEs See Also: List of integrated development environments#Java SUMMARY OF PRODUCT ACRONYMS
SEE ALSO
NOTES REFERENCES
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|