Introduction to Programming

The Main class and the main method

One class serves as an entry to a Java application. It has to be specified in the java command while launching the application:

java -cp <location of all .class files> MyGreatApplication

In the preceding command, MyGreatApplication is the name of the class that serves as the starting point of the application. When JVM finds the file MyGreatApplication.class, it reads it into the memory and looks in it for a method called main(). This method has a fixed signature:

public static void main(String[] args) {  // statements go here}

Let's break the preceding code snippet into pieces:

• public means that this method is accessible to any external program (see Chapter 7, Packages and Accessibility (Visibility))
• static ...