Exploring JShell: The Java Platform Shell

Discover a powerful tool that many Java developers still don’t know about

Officially released on September 21, 2017, Java 9 made the headlines for the modularization of the JDK. The Jigsaw project has been awaited for nearly ten years. Java developers naturally focused all their attention on this new feature, which marked a turning point in the history of the Java platform.

But the finally modularized JDK almost masked the release of another interesting feature of Java 9. This is the JShell, which allows Java to have its own shell. Java 13 was released in September 2019 and Java 14 is expected in March 2020 — I have the feeling that too few developers use JShell on a daily basis.

This relative anonymity of JShell is damaging since it can provide many services to those developers who make the effort to discover its possibilities.

In the following piece, I therefore propose an in-depth exploration of JShell, so that you can take full advantage of it in the future.