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What is the Java Class Library?

Java comes with a very large and useful library of classes and interfaces.

The Java class library supports a large number of capabilities, too numerous to mention at this point.

The Organization of the Library

The following gives an idea of the organization of the java class library :

java
  applet	  // applet support
  awt		  // Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT)
    datatransfer    // Generic inter-app data transfer
    event	    // Event handling
    image	    // Image processing support
    peer	    // GUI component peer interfaces
  beans		  // Java Beans (reusable components)
  io		  // I/O support
  lang		  // Java language support
    reflect	    // Java Reflection API
  math		  // Math support
  net		  // Network support
  rmi		  // Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
    dgc		    // Distributed Garbage Collection
    registry	    // Remote object registration
    server	    // Remote object creation
  security	  // Cryptographic security
    acl		    // Access Control List support
    interfaces	    // Java Security API interfaces
  sql		  // Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)
  text		  // Internationalization support
  util		  // "Utility" support (central)
    zip		    // Data [de]compression support

Note: Each version of Java adds considerably to the Java class library, so it is impractical to keep the above up to date.  If you wish to learn what is available in any given version of the Java class library, you should use your web browser to go to http://java.sun.com/j2se/ and click on the API Specifications link.

This page was last modified on 02 October, 2007