Packages and Packaging - Java - page 816

Chapter 21. Packages and Packaging
Introduction
One of the better aspects of the Java language is that it has defined a very clear packaging
mechanism for categorizing and managing its large API. Contrast this with most other lan-
guages, where symbols may be found in the C library itself or in any of dozens of other lib-
raries, with no clearly defined naming conventions. [ 59 ] APIs consist of one or more pack-
ages; packages consist of classes; classes consist of methods and fields. Anybody can create
a package, with one important restriction: you or I cannot create a package whose name be-
gins with the four letters java . Packages named java . or javax . are reserved for use by
Oracle's Java developers, under the management of the Java Community Process (JCP).
When Java was new, there were about a dozen packages in a structure that is very much still
with us, though it has quadrupled in size; some of these are shown in Table 21-1 .