What is Java?
The first thing to understand before diving deep into java is WHAT IS JAVA?. When people talk about java, what they actually mean?
When people talk about Java, they could be referring to Java programming language, Java runtime environment or both, because Java is a programming language as well as a runtime environment.
When we talk about Java as a programming language we majorly focus on the following aspects:
- Syntax
- Data Types
- Control Flow, like, decision making statements, looping statements and branching statements
- Object Oriented features, like, abstraction, inheritance, classes and objects, encapsulation and many more
On the other hand, when we talk about Java as a runtime environment, we focus on below listed aspects:
- Configuration
- Security
- Threading Model
- Input/Output
In addition to these, Java runtime environment also provides support to all the Java programming aspects listed above. People also refer to Java Standard Edition when they talk about Java runtime environment.
Java Standard Edition is the basic Java runtime environment. The Java SE environment also provides other environments as well that are derived from it, such as, Java Enterprise Edition (EE), Java Micro Edition (ME) and JavaFX. All of these are either the subset or the superset of Java Standard Edition.
The point to note is that Java is a flexible language that even allows the runtime not to be tightly bounded with it. One such example is of Android, it provides a very different runtime environment than the Java SE, which is one provided by Oracle. Android runtime environment (ART) performs the translation of the application’s bytecode into native instructions that are later executed by the device’s runtime environment.
