The explanation of "implementation" configuration in the official document is confusing

Help/Discuss
1

In the section “Dependency management” of “The Java Plugin” page,
we can find an explanation about “implementation”(one of the dependency configurations)

The sentense is here: “Implementation only dependencies.”

It was really confusing, because I had understood the “implementation” dependency actually means “it will be provided to both, compile time& runtime” so I could not understand what the word “implementation ONLY” stands for.

It seems better to me that we explain the configuration, like “dependencies used on compile time & runtime”.
(or, am I misunderstanding the definition of the “implementation”?)

Thanks in advance.

2

Yes, you slightly misunderstand, or rather it is not the full picture.
api dependencies are also available at compile time and runtime, but they are additionally available at compile time of consumers, because they contains classes you use in your public api (parameters, return types, supertypes, …).
implementation dependencies are dependencies only needed for the implementation, they are only used in private method signatures, method bodies, …