Exploring command level programming

- It is helpful to understand how to compile and run Java programs without using an integrated development environment. For this section, we will use Brackets as our text editor to write Java code and then compile and run the programs using the executables available from the Java Development Kit, or the JDK. All Java applications are compiled to bytecode that can run on any JVM, or Java Virtual Machine, regardless of the underlying computer architecture, making it platform independent.

A Java application can accept any number of arguments from the command line. This allows the user to specify configuration information when the application is launched. To write and test programs using the command prompt, it is important to locate the folder where you downloaded the Java JDK. This is required to compile and run Java programs on your machine. When you installed the JDK, along with your IDE such as NetBeans, the default directory for Windows should look similar to this, c:\Program Files\Java \jdk1.8.0 _31 We will use this information to set the path variables so we can compile and run our program from the command line.

To open a command prompt, we go to the Windows icon and type CMD.