That has changed somewhat. Among other innovations, Visual Studio Code now has good support for editing, running, and debugging Java code through a set of Java-specific extensions.

The Java Development Kit, with all the tools needed to compile and run Java applications, is distributed by the open source OpenJDK project. Developers can download and install JDK 24 for Java SE from ...

Both languages are open-source, which means they’re free and other people can add to the code libraries. Java is platform-independent and is compiled to bytecode with Java Virtual Machine, or JVM.

A Java compiler takes a text file and compiles it into a platform-independent Java file, meaning the compiled code can run on any OS. Learn how it works.