Phase I
The Machine
What Java is, and what is actually running your code.
Learn the portability problem Java was designed to solve. Then compile and run one program from the terminal, following it from source code through bytecode, class loading, and the local JVM.
When you finish this phase you can
- Explain why a native binary targets both a processor architecture and an operating system
- Distinguish portable source code, portable bytecode, and platform-specific native code
- Follow a Java file from .java to .class to a running program
- Distinguish the JVM execution engine, a runtime environment, and the JDK tools
- Write, compile and run a Java program from the command line
- Identify whether a failure happened during compilation, class lookup, entry-point lookup, or execution