In the Java World, Spring Framework and Spring Boot is one of the most commonly use frameworks. With the Extension pack for Java we have support to Maven, so let’s add support to Gradle with the extension “ Gradle for Java“. Gradle and Maven are the more common building tools in the JVM world (including Kotlin, Scala). With that, we have a more than enough support of Java in Visual Studio Code, however, there are some other extensions that we can add.

Let’s start by installing the “ Extension Pack for Java“, it includes a group of other useful extensions by just one click. If we press the extension sections in the side bar, and type Java in the search bar, we might be overwhelmed with the list of options. We are ready to make VS Code our Java IDE, it’s time to install some extensions. There are different options of JDK installers, the most common are: I always recommend to install a LTS (Long Term Support) version, at this moment Java 8, Java 11 and Java 17 are the LTS version available.

The JDK provides all the tools to run and compile the Java Code. This is step is required for any other IDE, we need to have a Java Development Kit (JDK) installed in our environment. If you already have installed it, good for you! Install a JDK So, let’s download the installer from the official page. The first part is to install VS Code on your machine. As a result we have a “swiss knife” for multiple purposes and avoid installing too many tools on our local machine. One advantage is that with Visual Studio Code we can also installed other extensions for other tasks like: Support Java Script, Git, Docker, Database connections, and more. Therefore, by installing the correct extensions we have make it our Java IDE for developing out applications. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand is not oriented to Java development, but it’s flexible enough and provides the ability to add extensions to support any programming language, or framework that you need. In Java we have great and very complete IDE tools like IntelliJ, Eclipse and NetBeans, all of them are oriented to Java Applications, have support for the main frameworks and tools in the Java World (Maven, Gradle, JPA, Spring Framework, Hibernate) and autocomplete options that simplify the live of any Java Developer.

How to use visual studio code for java