Features of Java

What are the features of Java Language?

This is the basic question that one should know before he/she wanted to learn Java.

We have many other programming languages like C, C++ , .NET and many other.Out of all these, there should be some reasons which made many people to choose Java to develop their web applications or desktop products.

Platform Independence
The main feature of Java which in turn brought a revolution in the programming language is the Platform Independence which is identified by the paradigm "Write Once, Run Any Where" , shortly called as WORA.

Let us say, we designed an application and provided the complete code in Java and complied the code in a machine which has Windows operating system.Once the Java source files are complied, we get the compiled code. This complied code can run in any machine having any operating system.Where as many of the other programming languages are not like this.We need to have different compilers for different operating systems and the code that works in one operating system may or may not work in other operating system.

The details on how this platform independence is achieved in Java will be discussed in future posts.

Object Oriented
 Its the beauty of the Object oriented programming to relate the programming experience to the real world.
Everything in the real world can be treated as object.If the same paradigm is followed in a programming language, it helps the programmer to break the complex functionality to chunks and build up simple solutions.
Java is a Object oriented language thus giving the programmer/code more flexible, effective.

Simple
The Origin of Java is because of the complexities involved in the programming languages like C and C++

Many of the problems/complexities are either made simpler or eliminated in Java.

For example, the memory allocation which is done problematically in C and C++ is taken care by the Java virtual machine, thus making the programmer unaware of the complexities involved in the same.

The operator overloading which sounds a complex functionality in C++ is eliminated in Java

There are many other topic to discuss the differences between C,C++ and Java.We will deal with the same in other posts.


Robust

More stress is laid on the Java compiler to avoid programmatic mistakes.Also, the exception handling in Java is so flexible.Java has huge set of Exception types already defined and the mechanism involved in handling the exception makes the language robust by giving minimal chances for the Systems to crash.

Multi Threaded

If a man takes 10 days to build a wall, How may days will 5 men take to build the same kind of wall?

What ever the answer is for the above question, it will be obviously lesser than 10 days. This is because multiple people are involved int he construction of the same wall at a time making the construction of the wall fast and efficient.

This is what Multi threading mean. It gives time effective solutions.

Java is a Multi threaded  language.The way we achieve Multi threading in Java will be discussed later.For now, we can note that Java gives a option to the programmer to make the program multi threaded when ever desired.


Security:
Java Provides sevaral tools to help you manage access to resources on any system.

For example, Java provides an option to create,store and maintain encrypted passwords by the keystore.

Rich API
Java is very rich in its API.

It has enormous well defined classes which are ready to use by the programmer in their code.

For example, if the programmer wants find the position of the first occurence of the letter "T" in the String "JavaTutorial", he/she need not write a program to find out the same.

Java's String class has defined method which can give the result for you.

The example given above is just the basic one.In the same way, Java has many other in built functionalities already incorporated in its API.

Java is Rich in API and the richness of a programmer in Java is proportional to the knowledge one has on its API.