To make this post's discussion more concrete, I will use some very simple Java classes that are related to each other via composition or inheritance and are in the same named package (not in the unnamed package) called dustin.examples. The rest of this post shows how to build and run Java code without an IDE for these situations.

However, for the simplest of example applications, this is not always the case. I have a pretty good idea now how my much 'overhead' my favorite Java IDEs require and make an early decision whether the benefits achieved from using the IDE are sufficient to warrant the 'overhead.' In most real applications, there's no question the IDE 'overhead' is well worth it. In my blog post Learning Java via Simple Tests, I wrote about how I sometimes like to use a simple text editor and command-line tools to write, build, and run simple applications. This post focuses on how to do just that.

A recent Java subreddit thread called ' Compiling Java Packages without IDE' posed the question, 'is a command that compiles a group of java files that are inside a package into a separate folder (let's just call it bin), and how would I go about running the new class files?' The post's author, kylolink, explains that 'When I started out using Java I relied on Eclipse to do all the compiling for me and just worried about writing code.' I have seen this issue many times and, in fact, it's what prompted my (now 4 years old) blog post GPS Systems and IDEs: Helpful or Harmful? I love the powerful modern Java IDEs and they make my life easier on a daily basis, but there are advantages to knowing how to build and run simple Java examples without them.

Gradle not compiling java