What are stub applications?

Question

I am trying to understand how and where Java is installed on my Mac (Mavericks this time) and I found this question and answers:

• Need help understanding Oracle's Java on Mac — Stack Overflow

Here is mentioned

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/Current/Commands. The binaries within that directory are stub applications

What are stub applications? They are not symbolic link?

Answer 1

Stub applications are smaller apps that do work for larger, more complex apps.

For example, an app can request information from a stub app concurrently with a main process that the original app is running. Then, the stub app can return information back to the main process that initiated the stub binary.