JDK vs JRE

When you're a new to Java, you see only a corner of its perspectives. What you see is that it is a programming language, but if you look closely, you gonna see it as a big and potential platform. Of course Java is a platform, an independent platform. A platform provides many tools to operate its functionality. I don't know about you, but basically I'm gonna show you one tool of Java, a JDK. And I will show one more about JRE, a minion of JDK.

JDK stands for Java Development Kit. JDK is a programming tool or a package that provide collection of programming tools to develop java application. Let's see a brief example! You might write content of java source code. Then you will need to compile the source code. How does source code be compiled? JDK provides tool called javac, a tool to compile source code to byte-code. And then JRE has to deal with the byte-code.

JRE stands for Java Runtime Environment. JRE contains JVM. JVM is java virtual machine. It is not a physical machine, but a virtual machine that run java source code. After javac compile java source code into java byte-code. JVM gather those byte-code and interpret into machine code for computer's processor. This is how java application run.

All in all, there many tools in JDK that I couldn't briefly explain all. But JDK and JRE are the subtle tools that beginner need to know for their further development. Hope this article can help for new java developers.