In the latest chapter of the course I’m currently taking, we have discussed the environment for Java. I was taught that in order to run a java application, one needs two things. A JDK aka. a Java Development Kit and a JRE, in other words, Java Runtime Environment.
The JDK includes all the commands, that I will discuss below, but before I jump right into it, it is worth discussing that Java became a popular language thanks to its independece from operating system, which is made possible as java source code gets translated into byte code, and the JRE runs it.
Now that I have created this ridiculous introduction for our topic, let’s look through the four most important java commands.
- javac
- javac is responsible for converting .java source code into .class byte code making Java a versatile tool that can be run on any system.
- it is included in the JDK
- java
- java is the command that will actually run the byte code that running javac has produced. It executes the program
- jar
- jar is the command that packages files together. It works similarly to zip.
- javadoc
- javadoc is used for generating HTML-formatted documentation