
You can choose between the Java® 2 Platform software for Windows 95/98/NT or for Solaris. The Java platform is available free of charge from the Java web site. This means that any computer system with the Java VM installed can run Java programs regardless of the computer system on which the applications were originally developed.įor example, a Java program developed on a Personal Computer (PC) with the Windows NT operating system should run equally well without modification on a Sun Ultra workstation with the Solaris operating system, and vice versa.īefore you can write and run the simple Java program in this lesson, you need to install the Java platform on your computer system. Rather than running directly on the native operating system, the program is interpreted by the Java VM for the native operating system.

If you are familiar with Visual Basic or another interpreted language, this concept is probably familiar to you. Java programs are run (or interpreted) by another program called the Java VM. The console printing capability is provided in the API ready for you to use you supply the text to be printed. The simple program in this lesson uses a Java API to print a line of text to the console. They let you add ready-made and customizable functionality to save you programming time. Java APIs are libraries of compiled code that you can use in your programs. The Java platform consists of the Java application programming interfaces (APIs) and the Java 1 virtual machine (JVM). Common Compiler and Interpreter Problems.Still, for production use I'd recommend formally compiling using ant or maven and the JDK. But I've never experienced a problem as a result. Yes, the compiler has some differences compared to the "standard" compilers by Sun Oracle and OpenJDK. Without the external compilation step, code changes take place a lot more quickly. When your classes start to get bigger, you'll find (or at least I did) that this takes up a lot of time I'm very happy with Eclipse (and IBM) for doing things the way they do. If you look at NetBeans, when you save a changed file it will call up an ant task to re-compile (via the JDK) at least the class you changed, maybe more. It's not really so important what brand it is what's important is that it is an incremental compiler it sort of keeps your whole program inside itself and if you change a class (maybe even just a method) it will re-compile just the bit of code you've changed.

For what it's worth, the Java compiler included in Eclipse is a derivative of IBM's jikes compiler.
