What is Java? A Beginner's Guide to Java & It's Feature

Oops… Yeah, that’s what is Java! Object-Oriented Programming Language that is based on the concept of Object-Oriented Programming Systems (OOPS).

Everything in Java is about objects. If you get the essence of objects, Java is as simple and likable as eating your favorite food.

Okay, but why should you learn Java? After all, there are so many programming languages just like food...

Why Java?

Java is like the variety of your favorite food that is tasty (easy to code) and healthy (secure and robust)!

Besides the fact that Java is among the top programming languages of 2024 and perhaps will remain so for at least a decade, Java has nailed it in almost every domain you can think of!

As Java is secure and multi-threaded, it is perfect for Banking and transaction management services. E-commerce shops and billing software have their logic written in frameworks based on Core Java. Mobile OS like Android uses Java APIs. Stock market algorithms are based out of Java. And most recently, all the big data - the humongous data is dealt with like a breeze with Java. In fact, the MapReduce framework of Hadoop is written in Java. Java along with other frameworks like Spring makes for a robust combination to sort implementation dependencies and write server-side applications in Finance and IT domains.

What is Java Programming?

Java is a write-once, run-anywhere programming language developed by Sun Microsystems. It is similar to C and C++ but a lot easier. You can combine Java with a lot of technologies like Spring, node js, Android, Hadoop, J2EE, etc… to build robust, scalable, portable and distributed full-fledged applications. Java also promotes continuous integration and testing using tools like Selenium.

History of Java

Java was originally developed by James Gosling with his colleagues at Sun Microsystems during the early 1990s. Initially, it was called a project ‘Oak’ which had implementation similar to C and C++. The name Java has later selected after enough brainstorming and is based on the name of an espresso bean. Java 1.0, the first version was released in 1995 with the tagline of ‘write once, run anywhere’. Later, Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle. From there, there has been no looking back. The latest version of Java is Java 12 released in March 2019.

Features of Java

Java offers plenty of attractive features -

• Platform independent language
• Rich standard library making it easy to code. You can create a whole stand-alone application using Java.
• Java supports automatic memory allocation and deallocation (called garbage collection).
• It offers great performance as Java supports multithreading and concurrency, thus making it a highly interactive and responsive language.
• Secure and simple

To know more about the features of Java, do read this nice article.

What is the Java platform?

You must have heard a lot about Java as a programming language. But, do you know it is also a ‘platform’? Java platform is a software-only platform quite different from traditional platforms like Windows, Mac, Linux or Solaris. The former runs on top of the hardware of the latter platforms. Java programs go through Java Virtual Machine, that converts the byte code into native code, thus making the program run just any device! This means you don’t need individual machine-specific compilers for the Java code to run. This is why Java is called a platform too. Java programming language is different from the Java platform. Java programming language helps you build applications. What you write in Java programming language is developed and run with the help of an existing collection of programs and tools collectively called a Java platform. Java platform consists of the JDK, JVM, and JRE.

There are four Java platforms of the Java programming language –

• Java SE (Java Platform, Standard Edition)
• Java EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition)
• Java FX
• Java ME (Java Platform, Micro Edition)

While stand-alone applications can be built on the Java SE platform, most of the world wide web (internet) depends on Java EE. Java ME is for applications on small devices (like mobile phones).

Components of Java

There are three main components of Java - JVM, JDK, and JRE.

JDK or Java Development Kit is where the developers write their code and run it through the JRE or Java Runtime Environment.

How is the code translated? That’s through the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). With JVM, any code is written in Java (or any other language) can be translated to Java bytecode. Any machine can then implement this code based on the Operating System. JVM resides inside the JRE along with the java packages (libraries).

If you have a system, you can try a few things as you read this article. To practice, you need to install JDK (Java Development Kit) and JRE (Java Runtime Environment) on your local system. To download the latest version, click here.

You can then set up an IDE on your system and work on the concepts that we will learn. Eclipse is a good IDE that I use, whenever I need to run a program on Java. It is easy to set up and does not bother you much. You can either download Eclipse or Easy Eclipse. Easy Eclipse is a lighter version of eclipse with fewer features. There are many more IDE’s, check them out here.

If you don’t want to do any of this right now, but just want to read about Java, that’s fine! Just read on, grasp the concepts and then start coding whenever you want!

And oh, this is a good certification course available for Java (Java Certification Program.), which you will love taking up after you learn the basics!

The Complete JavaScript Course 2024: From Zero to Expert!

Are you all setup?

Before we jump into coding, let us familiarize ourselves with a few terminologies –

Every java program is a collection of different types of objects that are defined by a class or interface. This is the basic structure –

class School {
//consists of several other objects and instance variables
public String schoolName;
public int ID;
Teacher[] teachers;
Student[] students;
…..
// and then some methods
public int getSchoolName()
{
}
}

The logic is all inside the methods, that can be as simple as getter and setter methods of a class or as complex as fetching something from the database based on multiple conditions!

Let us write a simple program and we will add to it as we learn more concepts in Java 

Note that, just like any other programming language, every stand-alone program in Java should have a main method to execute.

Create a Test class and add some simple code to it.

class Test{
public static void main(String args[]){
int rollNumber = 34;
String name = “Humpty”;
System.out.println(“My name is ” + name + “ and my roll number is ” + rollNumber);
}
}

There is learning in each line of this code.

• class – this keyword is used to create a java class. When you run the program, you would give the command javac Test.java to compile and java Test.java to execute. If you are using IDE, you have to just right click on the class and select Run.
• public – The public is an access modifier that indicates the visibility. The main method cannot have access modifier as private (access modifier). Private methods can be called only within the class, whereas public methods are visible to all.
• static – Variables and methods can use the static keyword. Why is the main method static? For static methods, we don’t have to create an object. Hence, we don’t have to create an object of Test to invoke the main method.
• void – if a method doesn’t return any value, its type is set as void.
• int, String – these are two of the many data types that Java uses. Because it also uses primitive types, Java is not considered a fully Object-Oriented language.
• System.out.println – out is a static field of the class System. This field stores the instance of PrintStream class. println() is the method of this class, that prints the required output to the console.

Let us slightly modify this program to get the name and roll number as inputs from the user. There are many ways to do this. For this code, let us use the most common method – Scanner class. To use this class, we need to import the class as import java.util.Scanner;

In the previous code, before the System.out.println (syso), let us add the following lines of code –

Scanner scanInput = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println("Enter name: ");
name = scanInput.nextLine();
System.out.println("Enter roll number: ");
rollNumber = scanInput.nextInt();

When you run this program, you will be prompted to enter a name and then a roll number.

The other way to do this is through BufferedReader, which is the traditional method but it has too much wrapping which can be difficult to remember.

Let us get information about more students – their names, roll numbers and subjects. Subjects will be in the array because for this program, let us assume, one student will take up 3 subjects.

Define an array as –

String[] subjects = new String[3];
//Get all the subjects from the student
for(int j=0; j<subjects.length;j++){
subjects[j] = scanInput.next();
}

• Here we are using a for loop to get subjects from the user and storing it in the String array. The syntax for loop has changed in the latest java versions, but this syntax is easier to use. ‘j’ is a temporary counter that starts from 0. Note that we do j
• subjects.length gets the length of the array, which in this case is 3.

To view the contents of the array, type Arrays.toString(subjects)

As we see, we have three variables name, rollNumber and subjects which all belong to a common entity Student. So, why not create a class and have all the 3 variables as members of the class? It will be easier to add, modify and delete data when we use them as objects!

Let’s create a class Student.java –

public class Student {
int rollNumber = 0;
String name = "";
String[] subjects = new String[3];
}

We will have to change our code to create an object of this class and access the variables through getter and setter methods. An example of getter and setter method is –

public int getRollNumber() {
return rollNumber;
}
public void setRollNumber(int rollNumber) {
this.rollNumber = rollNumber;
}

The IDE will create all these for you, but for your practice, it will be good to do it yourself.

Now, let us get back to our main program.

We already have all the data for one student, why not fetch details of more students! We can create an array of Student objects and store each student’s detail in one object from the array.

Let us get the number of students from the user as

int numberOfStudents = scanInput.nextInt();

Now, let us start another for loop, which will get details from all the students –

for(int i=0;i<numberOfStudents;i++){
//get details
}

All we have to do now is set the data into student objects. For this, create an array of Student objects of size same as numberOfStudents.

Student[] student = new Student[numberOfStudents];
for(int i=0;i<numberOfStudents;i++){
student[i] = new Student();
name = scanInput.next();
student[i].setName(name);
rollNumber = scanInput.nextInt();
student[i].setRollNumber(rollNumber);
// As we have written earlier
for(int j=0; j<subjects.length;j++){
subjects[j] = scanInput.next();
}
student[i].setSubjects(subjects);
}

Few things in the code –

• When we create the Student[] array, the individual Student objects are still null. That’s why inside the for loop, we are creating new Student object. Not doing this will throw a NullPointerException, when we try to use student[i].. We will touch upon exceptions later in this article.
• We are using next() for String instead of nextLine(). nextLine() will skip the current line and go to the next one. It is always better to use next().
• Let us say, user gives numberOfStudents as 2. The outer for loop will execute twice. The size of subject array is 3, so the inner for loop will execute 3 times for each outer loop, hence a total of 6 times.
• Note the naming convention in Java. The variable names and method names start with the small case but we capitalize the first letter of every word, while the class names start with a capital letter.

Now, we have all the data in the Student array. We can improve the code using a Java Constructor, which is a more efficient way of storing things in objects than a setter method. When you have a lot of data, instead of using a set method 10 times, you can set all the values in the constructor at once. Let us create a constructor in our Student class.

public Student(String name, int rollNumber, String[] subjects){
this.name = name;
this.rollNumber = rollNumber;
this.subjects = subjects;
}

Now, let us modify our Test class to use this constructor. Note that, now the line

student[i] = new Student();

will not work, as we have not created a no-arg constructor in our class. When no other constructor is defined, java compiler creates the no-arg constructor by default, otherwise, we should use the ones we create in the code.

Our code will now become –

System.out.println("Enter name and roll number: ");

student[i] = new Student(scanInput.next(), scanInput.nextInt(), subjects);

which reduces about 3-4 lines of code for us. Imagine, how useful it can be when there are many more objects and member variables. Note that the subjects array will be empty, as we are getting the values of subjects after name and rollNumber.

The next question is where do we store these student objects so that we can retrieve them later and do some modifications or display the contents of the list? The simple answer is ArrayList. It is very simple to create an ArrayList and add objects to it.

Some important features of ArrayList –

• ArrayList is dynamic. We can expand ArrayList at any time, the size is not fixed, unlike arrays.
• ArrayList is an important part of the Java Collection Framework.
• We can access any object in the list randomly.
• We can store only objects in ArrayList. If we have to create an ArrayList of integers, we need to wrap the primitive int types into Integer object.

Getting back to our code, let us create the ArrayList as –

ArrayList studentList = new ArrayList();

To add objects to the list, after fetching all the details, just add the complete object to the list.

studentList.add(student[i]);

Rather than confusing ourselves with looping over an array and addressing each object as student[0], student[1], etc… let us use an Iterator to fetch and display the data.

Think of Iterator as a cursor, that traverses through the elements of a collection. You can fetch or remove any element from a collection using an iterator.

Iterator itr = studentList.iterator();
System.out.println("The entered details of all the students are---");
while(itr.hasNext())
{
System.out.println(itr.next().toString());
}

• We don’t create a new object of Iterator(), rather use the list’s iterator method to point to itr.
• The while loop checks, if there are any more objects in the list using, hasNext() method. The while loop will end when hasNext() returns false.
• itr.next() gets the next item on the list.

You would expect the output to be the neat details that you had entered. Right? But Java will give us something like this –

The entered details of all the students are---

Student@e7b241

Why?

Because to print the members of the object individually, we need to override the toString() method in our Student class.

public String toString(){
String studentDetails = null;
studentDetails = "Student name: " + this.name + ", Student roll number: " + this.rollNumber + " , Chosen subjects: " + Arrays.toString(this.subjects) + "\n";
return studentDetails;
}

• The this keyword is a reference variable that points to the instance variable of the current class.
• To get values from an array, we use the toString() method of the utility class Arrays. Note that Arrays contain static methods and hence we need not create an object to use the methods. We are directly using the class name and method name.

Voila! You will now get the result you want!

But, there is one problem…

We haven’t taken care of the scenarios where user gives wrong inputs! For example, what if someone enters a String for rollNumber? We wouldn’t throw the entire stack trace of the exception to the user. We can instead, put a nice message to the user.

Try to enter a string for rollNumber, you will get Exception in thread "main" java.util.InputMismatchException

To ensure this doesn’t happen, we need to make sure the user enters correct values. But, how? Let’s put a try/catch block to catch the exception and display a friendly message to user when there is an error.

try{
rollNumber = scanInput.nextInt();
}catch (InputMismatchException ime){
System.out.println("Please enter a valid number");
}

We can apply the same for numberOfStudents too. The best practice is to put the entire code in the try block, so that any exception can be caught in the catch block.

This is called exception handling in Java. In a real-world application, classes can throw the exception and the last one will catch and display the appropriate message to the user. There are many more runtime exceptions in Java, the most common being NullPointerException, ClassCastException, ArithmeticException, IllegalArgumentException, ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, etc…

A quick recap

In this article, I have touched the basics of Java, with which you can start coding in Java as long as you know what a programming language is and have worked with some other language before. We have understood the basic concept of –

• Class and objects
• Constructors
• I/O streams
• For and while loop
• Primitive and non-primitive data types
• toString() method
• Collection (ArrayList) and Iterator
• Basics of Exception handling

through a simple program. There are many advanced concepts that are not in the scope of this article, however, stay tuned as we are coming up with more articles for advanced concepts like Threads, inner classes, interface, garbage collection and many more.

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