Running a Java Program
To see whether the Saluton program does what you want, run the class with the Java Virtual Machine, the interpreter that runs all Java code. In NetBeans, choose the menu command Run, Run File. An Output pane opens below the source code editor. In this pane, if there are no errors, the program displays the output, as shown in Figure 2.3.
FIGURE 2.3 Running your first Java program.
If you see the text “Saluton Mondo!” you have just written your first working Java program! Your computer has just greeted the world—a tradition in the computer programming field that’s as important to many of us as caffeine, short-sleeved dress shirts, and Call of Duty.
You might be asking yourself why “Saluton mondo!” is a traditional greeting. The phrase means “Hello world!” in Esperanto, an artificial language created by Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887 to facilitate international communication. It’s only a traditional greeting in the sense that I’m trying to start that tradition.