Chapter 1. Introduction to the Java Environment
Welcome to Java 8. We may be welcoming you back. You may be coming to this ecosystem from another language, or maybe this is your first programming language. Whatever road you may have traveled to get here: welcome. We’re glad you’ve arrived.
Java is a powerful, general-purpose programming environment. It is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, and has been exceptionally successful in business and enterprise computing.
In this chapter, we’ll set the scene by describing the Java language (which programmers write their applications in), the Java Virtual Machine (which executes those applications), and the Java ecosystem (which provides a lot of the value of the programming environment to development teams).
We’ll briefly cover the history of the Java language and virtual machine, before moving on to discuss the lifecycle of a Java program and clear up some common questions about the differences between Java and other environments.
At the end of the chapter, we’ll introduce Java security, and discuss some of the aspects of Java which relate to secure coding.
The Language, the JVM, and the Ecosystem
The Java programming environment has been around since the late 1990s. It comprises the Java language, and the supporting runtime, otherwise known as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
At the time that Java was initially developed, this split was considered novel, but recent trends in software development have made ...
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