What is Java good for?

What is Java good for?
Java is a software platform and multi-paradigm programming language.

The Java slogan "Write Once, Run Anywhere" well reflects the main perk of this programming language. The programmer does not need to write different implementations of the same code for different operating systems. The JVM (Java Virtual Machine) will do everything. This is a code interpretation environment that translates code into instructions that are understandable to each OS and processor.

In addition, programming is often started with this language.

Why?
Let's take a closer look at the areas in which Java takes a leadership.

Android Mobile Development
Most popular Android apps, such as the Telegram, Twitter, and Chrome mobile clients, are written in Java. The language has native support for tools for the Android SDK, and plugins for Android development are built into popular IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse.

Of course, since 2019, Google has announced Kotlin from JetBrains as the preferred language for Android development. But there are still many supported applications, training materials and documentation written specifically for Java.

Server development
One of the most popular web development frameworks for server development - Spring Framework - is written in Java.

Among the advantages of the framework:

• "Out of the box" functionality is already available for most tasks;
• the development kit includes drivers for many relational and non-relational DBMSs, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra and Clickhouse;
• built-in mechanisms of object-relational mapping (ORM);
• security software systems.
• It is convenient to develop in Spring because of its high modularity - the basic configuration of the project can be literally clicked on the Spring Initializr website.

Multi-threaded distributed systems

Distributed systems are the trend of the last decade. Top companies are trying to transfer development to the clouds, which are spinning on server installations in remote data centers.

This approach allows us to split the solution of one problem into many small equivalent subtasks, each of which is performed in a dedicated node. This can be useful when working with heavily loaded web applications or large amounts of data.

For distributed computing, there are several Java frameworks like Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka, curated by Apache. They offer data warehousing optimized for searching and processing and efficient algorithms for working with them.

Enterprise
Large companies in the enterprise sector, including Microsoft, Netcracker, IBM and many banks, use Java to develop and support internal applications. The language is popular because of its multi-platform, scalability and variety of software tools. In addition, it is much easier to find a Java programmer than an Erlang or Elixir developer.