Paul Petersen

The tools available to the Java developer exhibit several unifying concepts, which provide a framework to explore the next transition in Java-development tools. The first development tool that many Java developers use is the "javac" compiler that is bundled with the Java Development Kit (JDK). This compiler translates Java source code into the bytecodes that the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) executes. The "javac" compiler is not sophisticated, but it works and that's enough to get started. Another tool that may be used is "java" or "jre", the runtime environments for the JVM. The JVM interprets the bytecodes generated by the compile to portably execute the compiled program. At this point the developer has encountered two concepts. First, "javac" uses the notion of static analysis and static compilation to translate the Java language source code into the bytecodes store... (more)