Java (and OpenJDK)

I had a hard time deciding whether to rebuild my Java advocacy page or not. Ever since Oracle took over Sun Microsystems it took away a lot of fun for me from the 'Sun projects', and that somewhat included Java. Sun cared for the communities (maybe even a little too much) whereas Oracle solely cares for their revenue.

This becomes even more obvious when looking at the latest developments: apparently Oracle is now trying to monetize on Java by enforcing one of their specific licenses. Apparently Java isn't as free as many of us seem to think.

Even so, Java is still the first programming language I started to use more seriously for both private as well as some professional projects at work. It's a language I both deeply enjoy and respect, and well; that doesn't make it easy for me to ignore it ;-) . And there's also something as OpenJDK; an open source Java environment which, to some extend, is pretty much independant.

This page was last updated on: 26 Jan 2021 .

Object Oriented programming made easy

The best part about Java, apart from it's well known "write once, run everywhere" motto, is that it's relatively easy to learn and grasp. One reason for that is because Java somewhat forces you to follow some specific standards which For example, a well known 'Hello World' program can look something like this:

public class hello {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      System.out.println("Hello world!");
   }
}

Here you see that I defined a public class called hello. A class is basically one of the building blocks in object oriented programming. Normally every class is basically an individual 'block' which can 'do' something. And if you then combine such a class with other classes you soon get a relatively complex piece of software.

It maybe interesting to know that within Java the filename needs to correspond with the class name. So I can only put the code above in a file called "hello.java" and nothing else.

More advocacy to follow later..