1.3 Java Workflow
Taking a program from a .java file into an executable has two main steps in Java: compilation and interpretation.
To run the code in Hello.java, we must first compile the code into a .class file, which we can do using the command javac HelloWorld.java. Then, to run the code, we would use the command java HelloWorld.
In your terminal, the result would look like the following:
Class Files
There are several reasons for the usage of .class files, which we will only cover briefly here. First of all, .class files are guaranteed to have been type-checked, making the distributed code safer. They are also more efficient to execute, and protect the actual source code in cases of intellectual property. We will not go into the details of .class files in this textbook beyond knowing that they are created after compilation.
IntelliJ
In our class, we'll instead be using an IDE called IntelliJ. This will be introduced in HW1. Note that IntelliJ performs the two step process above, but hides the details from the end user, i.e. you don't notice that it separately creates a .class file before running.
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