Relationship of Package names and file structure

Question

I'm currently refreshing my Java knowledge and came across a question I couldn't answer yet:

How does the Java compiler know where the (possibly custom) packages are located on disk? I'd assume that using built-in libraries it looks up the java library folder - but how does it find the custom ones?

Here's the file's locations for the following example:

// part of the package
com/usuallyNot/example.java

// not part of the package
com/example2.java

Is the naming convention to be seen as relative path? If it's this, why do we need to write "import package com.usuallyNot.example;" (instead of "import package "usuallyNot.example;") even if the file we write it in resides in the "com" folder?

Answer 1

The answer is the classpath:

Classpath is a parameter—set either on the command-line, or through an environment variable—that tells the Java Virtual Machine or the Java compiler where to look for user-defined classes and packages.

There are instructions from Oracle how to set your classpath.

The classpath is searched in order of the folders that appear for a class matching the import. There are lots of details in how multiple classes of the same name can co-exist.

The classpath is set either by %CLASSPATH% (Windows DOS shell, $env:CLASSPATH in PowerShell) or $CLASSPATH in Unix or in the manifest of a Jar file.

You can see the future of classpath from the 2015 JavaOne keynot (starting @ 17 minutes).

Answer 2

If you didn't import your types, the compiler would have to perform expensive hard disk scans every time it encounters a custom type. That is very expensive; it's better to force the programmer to declare the location explicitly, so the compiler only has to open one file directly. (An additional advantage is that you can have several types with the same unqualified name, but efficient compilation is the big one.)