Java language features

A review of the history of the creation and development of the Java language would be incomplete without describing the features specific to Java. The main factor behind the invention of Java was the need for portability and security, but other factors also played a role in shaping the final version of the language. The development team summarized the basic concepts of Java and compiled the following list of its features:

• simplicity;
• safety;
• portability;
• object orientation;
• reliability;
• multithreading;
• high performance;
• distribution;
• dynamism.

Now let’s consider some of the most important features.

Simplicity

The Java language was designed to be easy to learn and effective to use by professional programmers. For those with some programming experience, it shouldn’t be difficult to master the Java language. If you are already familiar with the basic principles of object-oriented programming, then learning Java will be even easier for you. And for those who have experience in C ++ programming, the transition to java generally requires a minimum of effort. The Java language inherits C / C ++ syntax and many of the object-oriented features of C ++, so learning Java shouldn’t be too difficult for most programmers.

Object-Oriented

Although the predecessors of the Java language influenced its architecture and syntax, its design was not intended to be compatible with the source code with any other language. This allowed the development team to create Java essentially from scratch. One of the consequences of this was a clear, practical, pragmatic approach to objects. In addition to borrowing from many successful object-programming environments developed over the past several decades, Java has managed to achieve a middle ground between strict adherence to the principle of “all program elements are objects” and the more pragmatic principle of “out of the way”. The Java Object Model is simple and extensible. At the same time, primitive data types such as integers are stored as high-performance non-object components.

Dynamism. Java programs contain a significant amount of data of a dynamic type that is used to validate and authorize access to objects at runtime. This allows you to dynamically link code safely and efficiently. This is extremely important for the robustness of the Java environment, where small chunks of bytecode can be dynamically updated on the live system.

Interpretability and high performance

As mentioned earlier, by compiling programs into an intermediate representation called bytecode, Java enables you to create cross-platform programs. This code can run on any system that has a JVM virtual machine. From the very first attempts to develop cross-platform solutions, it was possible to achieve this goal, albeit at the expense of performance. As explained earlier, Java bytecode has been carefully designed to be highly efficiently converted directly to machine-specific code on a specific platform using a dynamic compiler. Java runtime systems that provide this capability retain all the benefits of platform-independent code.